8 1GT Monday July 20 2020 | the times
arts
mostly young female home-grown
artists. One of the festival’s few British
performers, the former Spacemen 3
and Spiritualized bass player Will
Carruthers, happened to be on
sabbatical in Iceland already. His
solo show at the Akranes lighthouse
was a gloriously chaotic mix of
poetry, profanity and boozy
blues ballads.
This tiny nation’s arts community
could teach the outside world a few
lessons in adapting to post-lockdown
conditions. With most leading film
festivals in corona-limbo, events
such as Ice Docs may even provide
potential pointers for future recovery:
more local focus, more flexible format,
more about passion than profit.
“It depends on the festival because
we are of course very small,”
Halldorsdottir says. “But other
festivals could actually try and look
inwards to their own communities
because what festivals are about
in their basics is bringing films to
their communities. Of course they are
about international networking and
markets and all of this, but they are
also so much about the audience.”An Ice Docs highlight:
Scheme Birds, a poetic
portrait of a teenage
mother on a Scottish
housing estateIce Docs screenings take place
at the Biohollin cinema, an elegant
1940s Scandi-Brutalist picture palace
huddled on a lonely stretch of
windswept coastline. The luxurious
interior is easily roomy enough for
audience members to remain socially
distant, in theory, although no one
seemed too bothered.
Yet even this small, remote festival
has not escaped the Covid-19 effect.
With travel restrictions keeping
foreign guests and film-makers away,
the organisers were forced to redirect
their marketing efforts towards a local
Akranes audience. “We almost didn’t
have the festival,” Bjornsson says.
“With no guests from abroad we had
no idea how the locals would react.”
As it turned out, the people of
Akranes responded well to free
film screenings, comedy shows and
child-friendly parties. “I really wanted
to make it like a village atmosphere
where everybody is together for the
whole festival,” Halldorsdottir says.
“It’s more about people being involved
in all of the programme.”
A new addition to Ice Docs this year
was a live music programme featuringReel life
returns to
the cinema
There’s one place in the world where
film festivals are still happening —
Iceland. Stephen Dalton reports
M
idnight on
Iceland’s wild
west coast. The
sun stubbornly
refuses to go to
bed, and pixie-
faced children
are dancing to
Nordic dreampop in the shadow of a
lighthouse perched on volcanic rocks
overlooking the vast North Atlantic.
Welcome to the documentary film
festival Ice Docs, in the tiny port town
of Akranes, one of the last semi-safe
havens on a pandemic-stricken planet.
No one is wearing facemasks or
keeping two metres apart here. It feels
like an idyllic throwback to an
innocent pre-lockdown world.
One of the first film festivals to
re-emerge in full physical form since
coronavirus put a global freeze on arts
events, Ice Docs defiantly went ahead
last week while bigger cinematic
gatherings including Cannes, Tribeca
and Edinburgh were forced to migrate
online, postpone or cancel. Ice Docs
became a realistic prospect largely
because Iceland has had remarkable
success at defeating the virus with
a rigorous testing, tracking and
quarantine regime. The country
has suffered only ten Covid-
deaths. In addition, all new arrivals
at Keflavik airport are tested for the
virus and informed of the resultswithin hours. Yes, I am officially
corona-free, thanks for asking.
Being a remote, roomy, sparsely
populated island nation helps too.
Iceland invented social distancing
years before it was fashionable.
According to the Ice Docs co-founder
Ingibjorg Halldorsdottir, Icelanders
also share a special kind of amnesia
that helps them to cope with
existential crises. “We are a nation of
people with no memory for disaster,”
she says. “We are not really good at
planning, but we are really good at
handling disasters and then forgetting
they happened.”
Launched just last year by
Halldorsdottir, Heidar Mar Bjornsson
and Hallur Orn Arnason, Ice Docs is
a local festival with a global outlook.
This year’s programme highlights
included Scheme Birds by Ellen Fiske
and Ellinor Hallin, an emotionally raw
yet poetically beautiful portrait of a
teenage mother growing up on a
Scottish housing estate, and Marshawn
Lynch: A History by David Shields, a
richly layered sports documentary
with a timely Black Lives Matter
theme. Yet the festival’s main prize
went to Collective by the director
Alexander Nanau, a nail-biting real-
life crime thriller about a shocking
political and medical corruption
scandal that toppled the Romanian
government in 2015.