Heiðin

Saw it on DVD my parents got on their holiday. Really cool, calm and collected, about nothing yet about everything.

Rare stuff and considering its 2008 I reckon the makers realized the trouble their country was in at the time. Which makes up for that tiny synt-sound in the otherwise good soundtrack which was the only thing that troubled me. For days I was thinking about this movie.

The landscape, if I could live in a place like this, so remote, so quiet and so pretty and rough. I don't know much about performances or what goes on behind the camera, but these guys know what they are doing. So real.

What I liked about watching this film was being gently surprised, because all the big action and hype over movies gets a bit too much sometimes, but this film just gently entertained me and my friend. Really an easy going movie with a laid back humour, beautiful to watch and the makers deserve credit for using the landscape as it fits the story, not too much but there is sometimes a lot of small talk about overusing the Icelandic landscape. That was maybe done in the early Icelandic movies. The characters somewhat keep you curious about them all to the end with witty but simple dialogue and all the acting is good. All of them totally believable. Its one of those movie one just has to see, it may not play along with the commercial culture but still is a film for everybody who like a true, human story about ordinary stuff. The issue of a broken family comes across thou it is not often in the foreground, the feel of the country side life is very convincing and all together some sort of magic brings you to the touching but unsentimental end. And the music is great.

There is something which irritates in the story, I think it is the wait of something to happen, though things are alway happening, just like in life, we wait for something to happen and we get irritated for some reason. We want to go but not to go. Stay but not to stay. And then the main character is not comfortable, which is also irritating in a way, still it is all in the head and the heart this film, not in the stomach. Girls in front of me where giggling once in awhile, after the lamb was dead I didn't hear from them again. But still with that mercy killing, an unbelievable scene, it is a sweet film. Small, simple and kind of cool, its one of the best slice of life movies I have ever seen.