Dreamland is traveling the world film festivals, just finished in Ireland, Transylvania, Warsawa, Tel Aviv, Toronto and Moscow. Also it has been screened by Cinema Politica in Canada and Sweden. You can follow Dreamland here on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/Draumalandid

The Blue Planet by Andri Snær Magnason will be one of three books to be read in the Nordic Library week, 8th – 14th of November 2010, taking place in more than 2000 libraries in all the nordic and many of the Baltic countries. The theme of the Nordic Library week this year is – “The magical north”. The other books in focus this week are from the Edda, and stories by John Lindqvist and Lene Kaaberbøl. The Blue Planet has been published in more than 20 countries and staged in 6 countries.  In the Göteborg Bookfair Andri will attend a seminar the 25th of September. More information in many languages can be found here.

At the screenings of Dreamland at the Toronto HotDocs Film Festival director Andri Snær Magnason gave out some bottles of pure volcanic ash from Eyjafjallajökull. The winners were those with the best questions at the Q&A. The bottles were signed by Jónsi that just performed in Toronto, Alex – Jónsi’s boyfriend and Andri. The idea comes from Dee Shanger – he is a member of the charity group, “Promoters Without Borders”. You can buy ash here at www.nammi.is and support the locals under the ash cloud. At the same site you can also buy Dreamland, the book in Icelandic and English, the film with English subtitles and voiceover and the soundtrack by Valgeir Sigurðsson.

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.

The sound reminded me of the sound coming from a mothers belly through a doppler device. So maybe I was right – the march eruption was not the real event. The water broke, flowing now over the bridges in the south of Iceland , the baby is born – a picture of the craters seen above. The newborn monster that has closed down all the airports in Europe. But again – the great Katla, is expected to wake up very soon, ten times bigger than this one, that was 20 times bigger than the cute one in March. So if we continue surfing metaphors – the first was just a glimpse of the heartbeat, the second is just the face – and Katla is the real monster we are waiting for. So stay tuned. Everybody that made headlines like this – will understand that nature can not be taken for granted. Instead of a tourist boost, world tourism is bust at the moment. All the airports in Europe are closed.

Some farms in the south of Iceland are threatened. The ash has been blown towards Europe so it has not hit Reykjavik yet. But the day was pitch dark in southeast Iceland yesterday. Life goes on as normal, kids to school, people go to work. Except one thing:

The leading actress in my play in the City Theater is stuck in Germany. So two shows tonight are cancelled! In Germany my book LoveStar is marketed under the headline, imagine if the world was ruled by Iceland. We experience now this strange feeling of power. No flights in Europe today. Stay inside if something from Iceland comes drifting from the sky. Terror alert! Even though the power of Iceland is negative at the moment, you see on facebook statuses the pride of being noticed, we exist. I am told that this is the same feeling North Korea is addicted to. A small nation getting this sense of pride every time Bush or Obama mentions them, that special pride you get each time the world leaders have a meeting, just because of you! This time, the world leaders are not meeting. Because of us. We are noticed. Therefore I am.

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.  

“Die Geschichte, die in der nahen Zukunft spielt, laviert irgendwo zwischen George Orwells “1984″, Monty Pythons Flying Circus, Douglas Adams’ “Per Anhalter durch die Galaxis” und Herzschmerzkitsch à la Nicholas Sparks. Autor Andri Snaer Magnason beweist mit LoveStar (Verlag Lübbe), dass die Nordländer nicht nur das blutige, düstere Krimi-Genre draufhaben, sondern auch das Heiter-Absurde.” – auf Anita Lehmeier.