iceland

Dreamland (Draumalandið) (Directors: Þhorfinnur Guðnason and Andri Snær Magnasson): My wife and I had the very good for­tune to visit Iceland in September 2008, mere days before the col­lapse of their banking system. Since we were there par­tially to cover the Reykjavik International Film Festival, we were invited to a recep­tion by the won­derful people at the Icelandic Film Centre where we saw clips of films in pro­gress and were able to meet the dir­ectors. One of the most inter­esting pro­jects we saw was Dreamland, based on the best-selling (at least in Iceland) book by Andri Snær Magnasson. I was able to speak to him that day and looking back, his sense of urgency as he warned of the short-sightedness of Iceland’s politi­cians was eerily pres­cient. The ensuing eco­nomic col­lapse has had rami­fic­a­tions around the world. So you can ima­gine how eager I was to finally see the fin­ished film. Unfortunately, my high expect­a­tions were not to be met.

Dreamland starts out well enough, giving a quick primer on recent Icelandic his­tory since achieving inde­pend­ence from Denmark in 1918. Founded to be res­ol­utely neutral, it didn’t take long to become a cog in the Cold War shortly after World War 2. The gov­ern­ment allowed the US mil­itary to build a base at Keflavik, and that base provided 2,000 jobs until it was closed in 2006. In a nation of just 300,000, this was a major eco­nomic blow, and so Iceland’s leaders went looking for a quick fix. With an abund­ance of clean geo-thermal energy, they decided to offer the sur­plus to the alu­minum industry. Aluminum smelting is one of the most energy-intensive and environmentally-unfriendly pro­cesses in the resource busi­ness, but Iceland’s leaders figured that it would all happen in sparsely pop­u­lated areas. Apart from the envir­on­mental effects, though, Magnasson argues that this kind of megapro­ject actu­ally harms the Icelandic eco­nomy in the long run. He’s turned out to be right.

I’m sure in his book, all of this is laid out and argued in a coherent fashion. The same cannot be said for the film. Early on, we’re warned omin­ously by experts that politi­cians often use fear to con­trol the elect­orate. Iceland’s politi­cians warned that if they didn’t build these megapro­jects, the eco­nomy would not grow and that jobs might dis­ap­pear forever. However, Dreamland stoops to the same fear tac­tics to make its case, and the irony seems lost on the film­makers. Ominous music accom­panies aggressive heli­copter fly­overs of unspoiled land­scapes, and these shots are used over and over and over. Half of the talking head inter­views are with Magnasson, who is only iden­ti­fied as “Writer” and not as co-director of the film nor as author of the book on which the film is based. The other inter­views are unhelpful, with some sub­jects seeming to jump from one side of the argu­ment to the other later in the film. Magnasson also presents a few too many shots of farmers and their fam­ilies who will be affected by the alu­minum plants. One or two farmers would have made his point.

The overall effect is that his few valid points are lost as the film becomes a heavy-handed and mind-numbing polemic. One clumsily-edited sequence attempts to equate the envir­on­mental damage of extracting bauxite (aluminum’s raw material) in India with smelting alu­minum in Iceland, when the two pro­cesses are com­pletely different.

I bought a copy of his book in English when I was in Iceland in 2008, and I’m looking for­ward to reading it, now mainly to see how a respected and intel­li­gent journ­alist could turn it into such a jumbled mess of a film.

Official site of the film

(6/10)

Tagged as: #hotdocs10, environment, iceland

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