MAY 2017

ESSAY

Survival
Tales
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Baltasar Kormkur is one of Icelands top film-makers, with his collection of films often focusing
on the harsh realities of nature. As the director gains Hollywood momentum, Laura Jurado looks
at how Kormkur tells stories of survival both in Iceland and around the world.
How do you prove a miracle? The doctor
didnt know how to answer. Sitting in front of
him was Gulli: a humble Icelandic fisherman
who became a national icon after swimming
for six hours in the frigid North Atlantic Ocean
when his ship capsized. In 2012 Baltasar
Kormkur brought his story to the big screen
in The Deep. Seven years later, the film-maker
returns to turbulent waters, this time in the
Pacific, to direct Adrift: a shipwreck made in
Hollywood that consolidates him as a narrator
of the struggle between man and nature.
Since the 1920s rural melodramas
nature has never been just a background
for Nordic cinema. At that time, the lack
of permanent studio facilities led to the
subsequent outdoor shooting. As University
of Copenhagens associated professor Casper
Tybjerg explains, the stunning Nordic
landscapes gave the films realism and seemed
to reflect and amplify the characters and their
states of mind.
Iceland was not oblivious to this
trend. Nature has remained the defining
character of many Icelandic films, points out
Bjrn gir Nordfjord in Adapting Literary
Nation to Film. It was mostly portrayed as
a positive element. Just occasionally, it
may show itself to be dangerous, details
the historian Tytti Soila in Nordic National
Cinema.
The New Wave Films and saga
adaptations brought on change. They projected
an alternative vision to the more glamourised
landscape evocations of earlier periods,
says Pietari Kp in his book Ecology and
Contemporary Nordic Cinemas. This new
tendency coincided with the popularity that
movies based on actual events gained in
The Deep the late 1980s and early 1990s, a moment
Djpi
Directed by Baltasar
Kormkur
when Kormkur emerged as one of the most
Produced by
Blueeyes Productions outstanding voices of Icelandic film-making.
After making his debut as a director with
101 Reykjavk and taking on the thriller
genre with Mrin, it would be in the 2010s
decade when the conflict between man and
nature would become more prominent in his
filmography. Im kind of wild for the dangers
of nature. Thats always been a part of me, he
admitted in an interview with Wired magazine.
Hurricanes, shipwrecks and avalanches have
since then been the driving force behind many
of his films.
Adrift, defined as Gravity on the
high seas and whose production will start next
fall, constitutes his return to Hollywood in a
co-production between RVK Studios and STX
Films, reaffirming himself as the film-maker
ESSAY
who best depicts real survival stories.
The script has been adapted by Aaron
and Jordan Kandell writers of the latest
Disney animation success Moana - from Tami
Oldhams real story. In September 1983 the
23-year-old girl and her fianc Richard Sharp
were on an idyllic and romantic boat trip from
Tahiti to San Diego. In spite of being expert
sailors, they found themselves in the middle
of Raymonds Category four hurricane and in
waves nearly fifty feet tall.
Baltasar Kormkur faces this new
project from the experience of a survivor: a
female heroine that will be played by Shailene
Woodley, Divergents saga star. Its a
harrowing, extraordinary and inspiring story of
love and survival against all odds, STX Films
chairman Adam Fogelson described to Variety.
After being knocked unconscious, Tami awoke
finding her boat in ruins and her fianc missing.
Masts, navigational instruments and the radio
system were broken, but she managed to start
a 41-day and 1,500-mile journey to the nearest
Hawaiian port.
To Fogelson, the Icelandic director
is the perfect film-maker to bring Tamis
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amazing open waters adventure to the big
screen. In fact, some critics have highlighted
the similarities between this new project and
Kormkurs survival tales debut, The Deep. In
a way, Adrift closes the circle of his anonymous
brave souls.
Gudlaugur (Gulli) Fridthrssons
ESSAY
story that occurred in 1984 was very similar
to Tamis. How did a 23-year-old fisherman
survive a ship capsizing, swimming through
five-degrees waters to reach the coast? What
made him the only one to survive? When
Gulli was admitted to the hospital his body
temperature was below 34C, yet he showed
almost no symptoms of hypothermia.
In a country so linked to the fishing
industry, his deed became a real myth. Gulli
represented hope in the face of the dozens of
fishermen who disappeared every year in the
Atlantic waters. Actually, the question of what
constitutes a miracle runs throughout the entire
film. Our true heroes wear fishing gear and
raincoats, remarked the film-maker to The
Huffington Post.
The Deep also established one of
Kormkurs survival tales principles: his
characters test not only their physical but also
their emotional strength. Back ashore, Gulli
became a strange being: a reborn, a revenant
who should not be there. If his sense of guilt
was not enough, Dr. William R. Keatinge
convinced him to travel to the United Kingdom
to undergo various experiments at the London
Hospital Medical College to demonstrate his
extraordinary resistance to cold.
His figure was in the antipodes of
the hero prototype. New Scientist magazine
defined him as a giant of 125 kilos. After the
conclusion of the study, he came to be known
as the human seal. His bodys fat had been
precisely what saved him from dying in the
sea as he did not lose corporal heat as fast
as the rest of his mates. Exposed to freezing
temperatures in a laboratory pool, Gullis body
temperature was still normal after 75 minutes
of immersion. No one else had been able to
resist more than 30.
With the determination of not
to deceive his compatriots 80% of all
Icelanders live by the sea, they know what the
ocean looks like, Kormkur recalls, he shot in
the harsh sea instead of filming in water tanks.
He was always the first to swim and ensure that
every location was safe.
His verism went even further with
Everest (2015), his most international man
versus nature to date. Kormkur took both the
cast and crew including Jake Gyllenhaal and
Josh Brolin- to the Everest base camp to film in
the hardest conditions. The productions second
unit was shooting almost at the peak. The
temperature both there and in the Dolomites,
where they also shot, was -30C. The hair
inside Gyllenhaals nose was really icy, it was
not made up, the film-maker confessed.
The story portrayed in the film went
beyond the natural disaster. As Kp explains,
in the last decades Nordic cinema started an
ecocritical approach to nature and natural
resources. To Kormkur, Iceland was not
just a region open to the mercies of natural
forces. In The Sea he exposed the problems
regarding the industrialisation of the sea and
the fish processing factories. Speculative real
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Katla
Photo by Alamy
state and land commercialisation also appeared
as the contemporary Icelandic background for
the criminal investigation in the successful TV
series Trapped.
Everest presents a critical insight
into the boom of Mount Everests expeditions
business in the mid-1990s. Here, the direct
conflict between man and nature was not
accidental but voluntary. An election plagued
with doubts reflected in the characters
dialogue: Human beings simply arent built
to function at the cruising altitude of a 747.
It hurts. Its dangerous. Why do we do it?,
asks the journalist Jon Krakauer. His diary Into
the Thin Air and Beck Weathers biography
Left for Dead: My Journey Home inspired the
Icelandic director to adapt the fateful events
that occurred on May 10th 1996. Again, a true
story that distinguished the film from previous
cinematographic attempts like The Summit or
Vertical Limit.
Between the training and the mortal
storm that took the life of twelve people, the
film shows the nonsense carried out by the
companies that organized the expeditions
to the Everest. Among them are those of
Rob Hall and Scot Fischer, exposed in the
film. Agglomerations in the mountain, the
coexistence between skilled and experimented
climbers with clients who were only there
because they could pay the 8,000 metres ascent
and even queues to cross the hills as if it was a
fairground ride. Nature is not a theme park,
warned Kormkur.
Katla, The Volcanic Dystopia
From Krakatoa, East of Java (1969) to
ESSAY
Pompeii (2014), disaster films have always
been drawn to volcanic eruptions. However,
none of these movies were set in Iceland
despite having almost 150 volcanoes and being
one of the countries with the most volcanic
activity in the world.
During the last Berlin Film Festival,
Kormkur pitched a new project to potential
partners. Katla, which will be a dystopian TV
series set in Reykjavk in a near future where
Katlas volcano has been erupting for two
years causing all kinds of strange events: from
mutations to epidemics.
The Icelandic film-maker will direct
at least the pilot episode of the series, which he
will also produce through RVK Studios, and
that is planned to begin its shooting in the fall.
Katla is considered one of the most dreadful
volcanoes in the country. Located under the
Mrdalsjkull Glacier, it has erupted twenty
times since Iceland was settled over a thousand
years ago. The last big eruption occurred 99
years ago and it lasted 24 days.
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