EXCLUSIVE: Production company announces strong film slate for 2017-2018 with Icelandic, Nordic and international talents behind and in front of the camera.

Co-founder and producer Ingvar Thordarson says The Icelandic Film Company’s motto is the same today as when he and producer/director Júlíus Kemp launched their Reykjavik outfit in 1991. “Great stories, often anchored in reality, discovering new talents and following them is our passion,” he told nordicfilmandtvnews.com.

Baldvin Z (Life in a Fishbowl) is currently filming his fourth project with the production duo, the lyrical drama of love and friendship Let Me Fall (formerly For Magnea). Based on true events, Let Me Fall tells of teenagers Magnea and Stella whose lives are forever altered when they meet. Stella drags them into a world of drugs which brings serious consequences for the two girls. Fifteen years later their paths cross again. 

“Baldvin is an outstanding actors-director and we’re very proud to have assembled around him the crème de la crème of Icelandic actors including Þorsteinn Bachmann [Life in a Fishbowl], Ólafur Darri Ólafsson [Trapped, Fantastic Beasts and Where to find Them 2], and Lára Jóhanna Jónsdóttir [Under the Tree], but also the two amazing newcomers Elín Sif Halldórsdóttir [who plays the young Magnea] and Eyrún Björk Jakobsdóttir [young Stella].” The €3 million film is co-produced by The Icelandic Film Company’s long time Finnish partner Solar Films with co-financing from RUV and support from the Icelandic Film Centre and Nordisk Film & TV Fond. Sena will release it next year in Iceland.

The Icelandic Film Company’s next high-profile project is Imagine Murder based on Iceland’s most infamous real murder investigation from 1974, with false confessions, wrongful convictions, and the crushing of several innocent lives.

When two men vanish under suspicious circumstances, the country demands a resolution. A young couple and four friends confess to the murders, after intense police interrogation and record days of solitary confinement. More than forty years later, the case was reopened when new evidence questioned the police investigation and today, it is still being debated and re-examined. Thordarson said writer Jón Atli Jónasson, (The Deep) has spent several years researching the case with a German retired investigator and new elements will be brought forward to this fascinating unsolved crime mystery.

Borg vs McEnroe’s star Sverrir Gudnason and Þorsteinn Bachmann have already signed up for the film to be directed by Icelandic director and cinematographer Eagle Egilsson (Once Upon a Time, CSI Miami). “Egilsson is Iceland’s secret weapon”, said Thordarson. “He moved to the US 30 years ago where he has been working as director and cinematographer of some of the biggest TV series, and he will return home to direct his first Icelandic film.”

The latest international name to have joined the project is Thordarson’s long-time friend, songwriter/singer Damon Albarn of Gorillaz and Blur fame. The €4 million psychological thriller will be released in Scandinavia by Scanbox, and Thordarson hopes to start production next year.

Other projects produced by The Icelandic Film Corporation are the following:

  • Gunnar Gunnarsson, Writer, a documentary about one of Iceland’s greatest novelists, directed by Júlíus Kemp. The project received development support from the Icelandic Film Centre. 
  • The Good Shepherd (Advent) based on Gunnarsson’s best-selling eponymous novel of 1937. “The book was a best-seller in more than 25 countries and sold more than one million copies in Germany alone. Walt Disney tried to option the rights to make an animated film version, but was turned down by Gunnarsson, and now we’re going to bring the book for the first time to the screens,” said Thordarson who has been working on the project with Kemp for four years. 
  • Geology, a sci-fi movie directed by newcomer Logi Hilmarsson. 
  • The Ambassador to be directed by Finnish director Alu Louhimies, based on a novel by Nordic Council Literature Prize nominee and former Sugarcubes musician Bragi Ólafsson. 
  •  The Icelandic Film Company is also co-producer of Louhimies’ upcoming Finnish historical drama The Unknown Soldier. 

Meanwhile Thordarson’s other production outfit, Berlin-based Neutrinos Productions, run together with Sophie Mahlo, has two projects in development, written by Jón Atli Jónasson (The Deep): the film The Falcon, about two men who escaped from East Germany and went to Poland, Russia, Mongolia before turning themselves in at Beijing’s West German embassy, and the crime drama series The Wall of Wounds, set in 1962 Berlin.

Neutrinos Productions also co-produced the Finnish Oscar entry Tom of Finland by Dome Karukoski, set to open in Germany on October 5 via MFA.