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Watching When the Light Breaks on a recent day in Thessaloniki, I spared a thought for anyone in the audience who might be wary of Gen-z’s famed sensitivity. For a film built around a painful secret and an awful tragedy, it’s delivered with refreshingly buoyant energy, yet the thing you hear most often is the sound of a stifled sob. It follows the death of a boy, Diddi (Baldur Einarsson), and how his group of friends cope with the immediate fallout. But here’s the twist: up until his death, he has been having an affair with a girl named Una behind the back of his girlfriend Klara (Katla Njálsdóttir). So when Klara eventually arrives on the scene, understandably devastated and taking the spotlight, it’s Una who must grit her teeth and hold back those tears.

When the Light Breaks is the latest from Rúnar Rúnarsson. This...

A pair of young adults sit on a rocky coast staring at the sun as it hovers on the horizon, casting an ochre glow over the landscape. They trade dreams, jokes and promises while smoking a joint. She teases him about being horny. He vows to break up with his girlfriend, so they no longer have to hide their relationship. Later, in bed, nestling into the grooves of each other’s bodies, they will excitedly murmur their visions of tomorrow.

None of their tomorrows comes true because the boy, Diddi (Baldur Einarsson), dies. On his way out of town, an explosion engulfs a tunnel in Reykjavik in flames, indiscriminately incinerating vehicles and bodies like his own. When the girl, Una (Elin Hall), hears the news, she is enveloped by a gutting despair.

Without ever working above a whisper, Runar Runarsson’s When the Light Breaks (Ljósbrot) finds distinctive and unexpectedly...

In our first encounter with Una (Elín Hall) and Diddi (Baldur Einarsson) in the long dusk of a Reykjavik spring night, they are thinking only of the future. The immediate future: will they be able to sleep overnight together without Diddi’s flatmate noticing? The near future, meaning the next couple of days, when Diddi officially breaks off his longstanding relationship with his high-school sweetheart Klara and starts a new life with Una. And the long term. A trip to Japan. A different life with a wider scope than Iceland can provide. “Should we make babies?” Diddi murmurs into Una’s ear as they lie, wrapped around each other like kittens, in his single-pillowed bed.

But when Diddi is killed in a freak fire in a road tunnel the next morning – a national disaster that claims upwards of a dozen lives – Una finds herself alone with her searing grief. Diddi...

The longest days in your life are those where a loved one dies. Exhausting waves of feeling lap each other over the hours, stretching and blurring them as disbelief gives way to panic, to fatigue, to deep and paralyzing sadness, all while practical tasks mount and accelerate. As you struggle through forms, travel plans and an immediate onslaught of phone calls, the memory of yesterday taunts you with its nearness and distance. How could life have been so different then? Will it ever be so ordinary again? In “When the Light Breaks,” Rúnar Rúnarsson poignantly dramatizes the vastness, smallness and strangeness of one such day, following rawly bereaved art student Una (Elín Hall) through the immediate, suffocating aftermath of her lover Diddi’s sudden passing — with spiraling emotions further confused by unresolved secrets between her and the dead.

For Una cannot openly speak of her love for Diddi (Baldur Einarsson...

Aníta Briem creates and stars in “As Long as We Live,” an upcoming miniseries about a new mother – and once promising musician – suffocating in her marriage. But things change when a young man, her new nanny, starts giving the couple little “assignments” to do.

“This boy is like Mary Poppins! He brings this new, sexy element into their home that neither of them can control. He helps them rediscover each other,” explains Briem.

“Beta has an 18-month-old child, she is in the midst of postnatal depression, but at the same time her body is becoming her own once again. I use sexuality as a representation for her awakening. She has this whole world locked away inside of her head and a big part of her journey is to bring it all out.”

She drew on her own life for inspiration, she says.

“I also found myself at a point where...