Quote:
Icelandic Film Centre wrote: The film is based on the novel by Indridi G. Thorsteinsson, which is set in a remote valley in the North of Iceland in the year 1937.The slump and sheep disease are crippling farming; young peple are streaming to the centres of urban expansion in this period of rapid economic and social change in Iceland. One farmer and his sons live in the valley alone with their debts and anxieties. The ties which bind the father to the land he has cultivated and lived upon are unbreakable. He has likewise played a leading part in the social organisation of the district and in the cooperative movement. Despite unremitting labour, his debts continue to steadily increase. When he dies, his son sees no point in continuing his father’s hopeless struggle. He refuses help from the neighbouring farmer and abandons the property and the girl he has been courting. The values which meant everything to the father have lost all significance for the young man, who directs his steps towards the town in search of the values of a new generation, a new age.

Land.and.Sons.1980.DVDRIP.x264.AC3.KJNU.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 34 min
Size: 	1.45 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	720x576 ~> 1024x576
Aspect ratio:  	16:9
Frame rate: 	24.000 fps
Bit rate: 	2 000 kb/s
BPP: 	0.201
Audio
#1:  	Icelandic 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/093E1F1208998AA/Land.and.Sons.1980.DVDRIP.x264.AC3.KJNU.mkv

Language(s):Icelandic
Subtitles:English

The post Ágúst Guðmundsson – Land og synir AKA Land and Sons (1980) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

This is the story of a spiritual and physical odyssey, comic and strange, made by a young theological student. Our hero is Umbi (an acronym for emissary of the bishop), sent by him to undertake an important investigation at Snæfell glacier. In particular he is to look into the conduct and behavior of Jón Prímus, the old pastor at Snæfell. Fantastic rumours are rife: amongst other things it is said that a corpse is lodged in the glacier! Armed with his tape recorder and notebook, Umbi embarks upon his mission. He tries to question the weird locals, a weird lot, but gets evasive answers. Slowly he is dragged into a quagmire of strange happenings and his efforts to understand only make him confused. If at the beginning he is a chiper, a mere device, by the end of the story he is inextricably involved, a committed participant in the bizarre events.

Director Guðný Halldórsdóttir is the daughter of Nobel-prize winning author Halldór Laxness, whose novel this film is based on.

1.29GB | 1h 32mn | 726×570 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/6D5585C3B09FA1F/Under.the.Glacier.1989.DVDRIP.x264.AC3.KJNU.mkv

https://rapidgator.net/file/59179564b1b2e55b0b338114957ef5a7/Under.the.Glacier.1989.DVDRIP.x264.AC3.KJNU.mkv

Language(s):Icelandic
Subtitles:English

The post Guðný Halldórsdóttir – Kristnihald undir Jökli AKA Under the Glacier (1989) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
In Rams, writer-director Grímur Hákonarson mixes drollness and pathos with commanding matter-of-factness. The narrative is so inherently poignant that Hákonarson understands it requires a dry directorial counterpoint, which he provides in the guise of initially misleading authorial distance. A documentary filmmaker making his fictional feature debut, Hákonarson structures Rams with a sense of restriction that’s similar to that of certain documentaries, as if only some gestures could be captured within this rural Icelandic setting. There’s little exposition, though one’s given what they’re needed to orient themselves, as characters are observationally shown, at length, to engage in the processes that define their lives, particularly farming, sheep competitions, and tormented drinking.

Rams is an austere and lonely film, at times suggesting the result that may arise from re-editing The Turin Horse into a compact quasi-comedic thriller. Two sheep farmers assume the center stage of the story, Gummi (Sigurður Sigurjónsson) and Kiddi (Theodór Júlíusson), upper-middle-aged brothers who each farm their own half of the same vast plot of family land, somehow without speaking to one another for the last 40 years. In a typically succinct bit of physicality that serves as character portraiture, Gummi finds an injured ram on Kiddi’s side of the property, drives it up to his brother’s home and points with deliberate sharpness down toward the area where he found the animal. The purposeful angularity of Gummi’s pointing entirely encapsulating their decades spent in united apartness.

Gummi and Kiddi are the sort of men for whom the phrase “salt of the Earth” was coined: stout, capable, burly, probably not given to much contemplation of self. The story of their animosity toward one another is aired by supporting characters rather than the men themselves, though their longing and uncertainty manifests itself in the tenderness they exhibit toward their rams. The way the men grasp the rams’ horns, with simultaneous love and power, is particularly haunting. With his long face, Gummi even resembles a ram, fleetingly, in certain images that show him nested closely with his creatures, governing and empathizing with them in intermingling fashions. The brothers have adopted their prize-winning legacy rams in a fashion that mirrors our relationships with all our pets: as safe, unquestioning receivers of our love.

Anecdotes gradually differentiate Gummi and Kiddi. Gummi is the more thoughtful and pacifistic of the two, while Kiddi is a hard drinker given to raging at Gummi in the middle of the night. In a striking tableau, we glimpse Kiddi in the background, outside, with Gummi’s bedroom in the foreground. When Kiddi points a rifle into Gummi’s room, he appears to be aiming it at us, the gunshot splintering a window that serves as a frame within a frame. Rather than raging back at him, Gummi simply, comically, sends Kiddi an invoice for the broken windows after fixing them. And after his brother passes out outside from another drunken all-nighter, which is dangerous in the cold of this wilderness, Gummi uses a bulldozer to lift the massive Kiddi up and take him to the local hospital. This sequence is staged with an unquantifiable kind of tough-tenderness that’s reminiscent of the films of Bill Forsyth.

Every moment in Hákonarson’s strange and wonderful film is imbued with mystery and revealing dignity. Gummi cooking a Christmas dinner for one, his special treat apparently a can of Coke, is almost too heartbreaking to contemplate. Intensifying the resonance of this scene is Gummi’s palpable enjoyment of the meal; this is a man used to inhabiting his orbit alone, deep in his mind, whether he’s eating dinner or assembling a jigsaw puzzle. Of course, Rams is a redemption story, and, of course, these brothers soon find themselves uniting after a long divide. But Hákonarson emphasizes the costs—and even the treasures—of that long divide, rather than the ambiguous, cathartic reward of its eventual dissolution.

https://nitro.download/view/569571DA9378B68/Grimur_Hakonarson_-_(2015)_Rams.mkv

Language(s):Icelandic
Subtitles:English

The post Grímur Hákonarson – Hrútar AKA Rams (2015) first appeared on Cinema of the World.