Kjartan Kjartansson

Icelandic performance art meets Spinal Tap in this wickedly fun look at women behaving creatively. Three bandmates, Álfrún, Saga and Hrefna, of The Post Performance Blues Band, are tired of playing to audiences of five at their gigs and getting paid in beer. Each of them is staring down 40 and exhausting themselves juggling motherhood and their artistic pursuits. They decide to give themselves one year to either become popstars or quit the band for good. What follows is a make-it-or-break-it story of a band that's not really a band, pursuing a goal that is not actually attainable. Band member and filmmaker Álfrún Örnólfsdóttir puts herself, along with age and gender bias, on stage in this docu-parable about talented but not teenaged women trying to be successful in a youth-obsessed, overnight-success industry. Band allows gifted artists to perform the resilience and sisterhood that truly exists between life's messes, rejections and triumphs.

Comedian Þorsteinn Guðmundsson travels from Reykjavik to Hrísey, a small island in the North of Iceland to do stand-up in the middle of the winter. On the way he sings, eats fast food, and thinks out loud about sex and Christmas. When being on the road in Iceland you're forced to expect the unexpected and be ready to make serious compromise to lodging. The groupies are also mostly adolescent boys with bad skin.

Comedian Þorsteinn Guðmundsson travels from Reykjavik to Hrísey, a small island in the North of Iceland to do stand-up in the middle of the winter. On the way he sings, eats fast food, and thinks out loud about sex and Christmas. When being on the road in Iceland you're forced to expect the unexpected and be ready to make serious compromise to lodging. The groupies are also mostly adolescent boys with bad skin.

Icelandic country boy Tómas R. Einarsson got hooked on rhythm in childhood, but couldn't imagine that anything so much fun could be a job. In his twenties passion finally took over and he threw himself head first into learning how to play jazz on the double bass. From there he moved on to the enticing rhythms of Havana. After decades on the road, Tómas returns to his weather-beaten birthplace, with a full Latin band and some hot rhythms of his own.

Based on an astonishing true incident that took place on the frigid seas off Iceland in 1984, The Deep fashions a modern-day everyman myth about the sole survivor of a shipwreck, whose superhuman will to survive made him both an inexplicable scientific phenomenon and a genuine national hero.

Silent Voices tells the story of Icelandic nature that is in danger due to dam and powerplant projects. Furthermore, it touches on the story of the land that has already been sacrificed for heavy industry, around 80% of produced electricity in Iceland goes directly to multinational heavy industry corporations.

In the mid to late '90s, the Reykjavik crime and drug scene saw a drastic change from a relatively small and innocent world into a much more aggressive and violent one.. The film tells the story of this change through the fictional gang of pushers that took control of Iceland's underworld.

A short film about a young boy's escape from reality, the search for love and security, about cryptic messages from outer space and an invisible friend in the cellar. Based on the director's own memories, this is the story of a young boy's world filled with fantasies and dreams of distant worlds. His eccentric grandmother is his best friend and his partner in the world of the imagination.

The battle of two great chess players to mentally overpower one another takes on a dimension of life-or-death physicality as their duel begins to echo with the violent sounds of warfare from centuries past.

The battle of two great chess players to mentally overpower one another takes on a dimension of life-or-death physicality as their duel begins to echo with the violent sounds of warfare from centuries past.

Bon Appetit is like a bowl full of colorful, savory candy. It is a beautiful and magical story about two women, and the vague borders between reality, imagination, memory and dream.

Bon Appetit is like a bowl full of colorful, savory candy. It is a beautiful and magical story about two women, and the vague borders between reality, imagination, memory and dream.

Four years in the making, the film features interviews and footage never seen before, as well as older scenes of John and Yoko together, in private and performing in public. Yoko Ono talks about her and John Lennon’s love and life together, about the art they made together and their struggle for peace and justice, including the imaginative methods they used to get their message across: “Give peace a chance.” Lennon’s music provides an inspirational soundtrack to a story that that began more than forty years ago and is still unfolding. In 2007, when Yoko Ono dedicated the Imagine Peace Tower to John’s memory she added: “My love for you is forever.”

It is the night before Christmas and all through the decrepit school house nothing is stirring, not even a mouse. Well that is not exactly the truth, but what has happened in this weather beaten building in the barren Icelandic tundra is more akin to cruel fantasy than stark reality. A few days ago the participants of an experimental rehab clinic came there in order to cast out their inner demons, stay away from temptation and finally discover a little about their sober selves. That didn’t go quite according to plan, but they discovered Santa was real.

This is a documentary about a teacher from Reykjavik in search of her roots and interested in the preservation of old tales and history. Our story opens in the remote Mýrar cemetery in the West Fjords. The narrator is standing by her forefathers´ grave, which is overgrown and neglected and she senses her dead ancestors call out and implore her to do something. Beautiful irons cross lies on the grave of a young boy who died in the middle of the nineteenth century. Her curiosity aroused, the narrator discovers the story behind the iron cross memorial by talking to the archaeologist, Gunnar Bollason. She then goes on to discover similar iron crosses in cemeteries elsewhere in the southwest of the country. We visit the town of Þingeyri and watch as the broken iron cross from the family grave is repaired by the skilled craftsmanship of Kristján Gunnarsson at his engineering workshop, a workplace with an unbroken tradition going all the way back to 1913.

Robert is an important man with big responsibilities. One day he has an accident that blurs the border between the man and the beast within. Robert acts out and suffers the consequences.

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Running with the Herd is a unique and beautiful film. Director Thorfinnur Gudnason and his team bring to life a dramatic tale with sharply defined characters – all of them horses. Stretching the limits of the nature documentary has been Gudnason´s forte and his earlier film, Woodmouse: Life of the Run, has been shown around the world. Here he takes us into the world of horses running wild in the stark but majestic highlands of Iceland. Without humanising the animals in any way, the film tells a story full of drama and emotion, character, danger, and resolve.

To start with we are led to believe the setting is a country-hotel of some sort. In the end we discover this is a State Rehabilitation Facility and everything that happens is a carefully orchestrated escape plot by some of the inmates. The film was shot on location at an isolated boarding school in Saelingsdalur in the west of Iceland. The school is used as a hotel during the summer months but the film takes place in the wintertime.

An experimental-documentary of the spirituality in Iceland, and the ultimate freedom it entails, as seen through the eyes of a foreigner. The filmmaker narrates his in-camera edited film. The sound design was recorded live, all in one take.

Beatrice's fiancé is killed by a monster in Iceland. The monster is immortal, but longs to die. Beatrice helps him achieve this by contacting a scientist who can destroy matter painlessly.

Over the course of a year, we watch the bridge builder Haukur Karlsson and the musician Pál Pamphichler Pálsson at work, including the Eyjafjöll region on the south coast, Hvalfjörður and Skeiðarársandur, and Páll rehearsing the Reykjavík Brass Band for its anniversary concert, conducting the Icelandic Opera Orchestra in Der Fledermaus and having a work of his performed at a large open-air concert in Austria. The film suggests that all there certains themes common to all work, and that these men's occupations are not as different as they may seem to be at first glance.

In the middle ages a small Greenlandic boy comes drifting with an Iceberg to a remote and superstitious settlement in Iceland and is believed to be an evil spirit by his looks. He saves a young boy from an avalanche and they become friends. The young Icelandic boy has to fight for his friends existence against the ignorant villagers, who want him imprisoned or even killed

The story of an Icelandic man and his slow descent into madness. Along his journey he meets Dagný, the initial cause of his breakdown. Other people he meets in the asylum have been committed for various reasons, such as signing cheques for Adolf Hitler and, believing themselves to be writing songs for the Beatles and telepathically transmitting to the band.

The story of an Icelandic man and his slow descent into madness. Along his journey he meets Dagný, the initial cause of his breakdown. Other people he meets in the asylum have been committed for various reasons, such as signing cheques for Adolf Hitler and, believing themselves to be writing songs for the Beatles and telepathically transmitting to the band.

Sol Jensen, a young Icelandic woman, and Halil Atesh, originally from the countryside in Turkey, meet in Reykjavik and fall passionately in love. Ten years later, Halil becomes an established businessman, while Sol runs a beauty parlor. Their two daughters, Leila and Aysiia, attend a Catholic school despite Halil's Muslim background and much to his grief. The split between him and Sol increases with the growing up of their daughters in a culture that is not his.

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In search of kicks in Reykjavik in the year 2000, a pretty teenager, Stella, teams up with a handsome alcoholic, Robbi, and in a stolen car careers through Iceland with unexpected and bizarre consequences.

Devil's Island is a bitter sweet tale of Iceland in the fifties. Life is rough in Reykjavik's post-war slum of Camp Thule, where the abandoned US military barracks have been turned into makeshift homes. Struggling wives and their hard-working husbands try to make ends meet. The younger generation dreams of dollars, Rock'n'Roll and the American way of life. To celebrate or to drown their misery - they're never short of a good reason to booze. Devil's Island vividly depicts the everyday life of a wacky family, their neighbours and friends and shows how some of their dreams come true and others don't.

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Benjamin Dove is a story of a group of friends who form their own little round table of knights. The first thing they see in the morning is what they are to be called. Benjamin saw a dove first thing, hence, Benjamin Dove. However problems start to occur as some boys are outcast, some are kicked out, new gangs are created, rivalry and chaos ensue and finally it ends with a death. A death no one in the sleepy town expected.

A modern businessman surrounded by all the trappings of success, picks up a beautiful woman who is hitchhiking along a lonely stretch of road in the south. Quiet, mysterious, the woman is an artist on the way to Meðalland to sketch. Always ready to take advantage of an opportunity, the young man adjusts his itinerary to help the beautiful artist, and with luck, he thinks, help himself add another notch to his sexual belt. But all is not what it seems in this world. The question arises as to whether all the expensive aids of modern affluent society can help him avoid what appear to be forces that transcend time - or is it all imagination, or hallucination, or both?

An elderly couple leave their retirement home to make one last journey back to their home in the Western Fjords.

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