The documentary film Dreamland, directed by Andri Snær Magnason and Thorfinnur Gudnason will take part in the HotDocs festival in Toronto.
Dreamaland will be screened in Winnipeg as a part of Nuna/Now festival, it will then participate in the Tel Aviv , in Poland in the end of June etc… For more information go here: www.dreamland.is
When I went to see the volcano in march I was astonished how small and human the scale of it was. You could come very close. The volcano was warm like a camp fire, the sound like a heartbeat, the lava like breaking glass. It was extremely romantic in the night under northern lights. If you look at my video – you will see that it spewed almost no ash, just a small white puffy cloud. It was a nice volcano – or a sleeping dragon – or it was just the birth of something larger.
Another eruption has started – 10 times bigger this time. After the really depressing and endless IceSave debate the volcanic eruption in South-Iceland gave us something more thrilling and uplifting to talk about (I am not kidding, people were delighted – look at the video and you will understand). The eruption went on for almost three weeks, people drove up to see it in the night under blazing northern lights. The eruption stopped exactly the morning when the long awaited national report on the banking crash was released. Then into the midst of the outrage – it started again, under the glacier this time – ten times bigger, causing flash floods and a cloud of ash in the sky – so sorry Norway and Russia – no flights tomorrow.
When we were making Dreamland I went through lots of the 8mm films that my mother took in the 1970s and also some of the 16mm my grandfather Árni, took way back in the 1950′s. Here we are swimming in New Jersey at our grandfathers house in New Jersey, I believe in the year 1980. The big white home of the Thorbjarnarson family in the suburbs of New Jersey. We are playing with uncle John’s boa constrictor. It had also been swimming with us in the pool. Here we have Kathy Thorbjarnarson, John reading the paper while his snake is playing with the Björnstopper children -that is the children of my twin mothers, Guðrún and Kristín Björnsdottir. John the owner of the boa constrictor died of malaria in India last february. He became a specialist in the field of alligators and crocodiles, anacondas and turtles. You can read about him here in the Economist, here in the New York Times and here on my own site.
This is the first time I see a volcanic eruption. Like seeing a prehistoric creature. One curious thing is the sound. What does a volcano sound like? They are probably very different, but this is a very nice volcano. You can hear the sound a few kilometers away, like a pulse, like a heavy breath, a breathing dragon. Even in my low quality camera, the sound comes through quite close to reality. And strangely it is not overwhelming up close, a running diesel engine will ruin the acoustics. It’s very ambient, on a very human scale, but also hypnotic with the gushing red lava that the eyes see, but somehow the brain does not comprehend. Boiling rocks – they are there, the stuff stars are made of - but you do not really understand. The volcano does not roar like thunder, it’s nothing like the power of standing by a roaring waterfall and it does not explode like fireworks or a bomb. When lava meets ice we see steamy explosions, but compared to new years eve in Reykjavik, the eruption is a relatively silent event. The volcano throws heavy molten rocks a hundred meters up into the air, but there is no bang when they land, just thumps and the pulsing strokes of bubbling molten earth. The ash sometimes falls on your head. Once in a while you will hear a heavier thump followed by a high spray of lava. The volcano has a bass like whipping woofer sound. You can hear it in in the middle of the video. The closest sound I could think of is the beat you hear from a pregnant woman’s belly. (Trust me on this I have four children). The whipping whooshing sounds as heard through the doppler device. So mother earth metaphors are not so far fetched. But the volcano is slower – not 150 beats per minute, probably closer to 50. I went up there with my friend Christopher Lund, more pictures can be seen here: www.chris.is and on the National Geographic website.
Compare for yourself here. A randomly picked doppler fetal sound on youtube.
Draumalandið – (Dreamland) the music by Valgeir Sigurðsson has been published by the Bedroom Community.
Here above you can see music samples cut to parts of the film. Valgeir Sigurðsson has made his name as an exponent of musical subtlety. As an engineer and producer, he’s often focused on the intimate, the miniature. On his solo debut Ekvílibríum, his songwriting and composition tended towards the muted or the oblique. His best-known work is punctuated with question marks and ellipses, and not so many exclamation points.
But this is only one side of his musical capabilites. Draumalandið (“Dreamland”), a documentary about the exploitation of Iceland’s natural resources, tells a story about huge things—the fortunes of a whole nation; the destruction of vast landscapes; and the global economic forces, greater still than any nation, that fuel it all—and for his soundtrack to the film, Valgeir has brought out a heavier set of tools. His entire roster of Bedroom Community labelmates contributes in some way to the creation of the score: classical composers Nico Muhly and Daníel Bjarnason, industrial wizard Ben Frost, and American folksinger Sam Amidon, along with a host of others, and the small orchestra assembled for the record swells from moments of expansive beauty into massive, surging symphonic force. Its harmonies are anxious, pulsing, driven.
