Hylberg, the director of Godland said in an interview that Danes will see his film one way, Icelanders another, and international audiences in a third way. I'm an American who lives in Copenhagen, and I have Icelandic friends. I'm right in the center of the triforce.
Hylberg is right that there are different levels at which one can understand the film. The main character, a Danish priest named Lukas sent from Copenhagen to build a church in a remote settlement, is a photographer. The first frames of the film announce that it is based on early photographs of Iceland found in a wooden box. Hylberg admits in interviews that this premise was entirely contrived, but as an unknowing audience member, I thought the film was recreating the circumstances behind the actual photographs found in the box. Photography is the idiom of the camera work, with beautifully framed, lingering shots of the Icelandic wilderness.
On another level the film is about colonialism. Lukas does not speak Icelandic, and cannot understand the Icelanders that port his supplies on the long journey across the country from coast to coast. He disregards the advice of the locals, and the trip turns deadly. He falls ill and becomes delirious, and his porters care for him drag him on a tarp behind a horse. When he arrives at his destination, a Danish settler asks him why he didn't just sail directly to the settlement. It turns out that the ordeal was a choice, so that Lucas could get to know Iceland. Lucas continues his photography, but all but ignores the Icelanders. In a montage, nearly every photograph he takes is of a Dane, often as not beautifully framed by Icelandic nature. As time goes by, he feels about Iceland more and more like my Turkish friend does about Istanbul. Beautiful place, except for all the people.
A third level of the film is the permanence of nature and the finiteness of life. The camera follows the breaking and butchering of a sheep by the Icelanders, and there are a series of overhead shots of a decomposing horse. Human cadavers turn up here and there as well. Death is mixed in with the indifference and continuity of the landscape and the seasons.
This is film as art, and the pacing is slow. The meditative, long camera shots ask the viewer to contemplate its message as part of the viewing experience. The filming was also slow, taking place over two years, and one of the young girls in the settlement grows visibly from the first time we meet her to her last scenes. This isn't an adventure story, it is a deliberative walk through 19th century Iceland, with an unlikable guide. I like the way that critic Alan Zilberman put it in his review: this is the kind of film the viewer has to meet halfway.
