Film Festival

The Reykjavík Film Festival is going on and some of the movies are shown just a few blocks down from my flat. I went to the festival last year too. So far we've seen:

"Steam of Life" (good)

It's basically filming Finnish men talking about their personal lives while in saunas. It was good and had good music, although I was got really sleepy partway through. I went to the vending machine later and got a drink but instead of water I got "Orka" by accident, an energy drink. I had thought it was water because the label was white and blue but the brand (Egils) is a soda brand so I should have known.

Then we watched a few Icelandic shorts. One was "Try Again" (good), about a man who is about to attempt suicide and gets interrupted, so by various circumstances gets locked out of his flat in only his underwear and has to deal with various neighbours. There were no subtitles but it was easy enough to understand that I got the gist of it. Another was "Knowledgy" (okay) which was great until near the ending, which left me with a "could have been better" feeling. It was about a film student who's late on his rent so the landlord makes him film some things to make up for it.

"Breki" (good)

Based on real life about a fisherman who died at sea. The movie follows his son as he remembers things at a therapy session. The camera was shakey and the picture was the type of thing you would see on a home movie, or memory sequence. Most of it is random memories of the father with his young boy, around five years old. The movie was made as a sort of memorial not just for the son who wrote the script, but for the Director who knew(?) the man as well.

After these and two more shorts which were so terrible it's not worth mentioning, the Directors of a few of them got onstage to answer questions. No one really had any. It would have been much better if they had asked for critique.

Then later, we watched Mamma Gógó (okay) about a lady who gets Alzheimer's and gets sent to a home by her family, while her favourite kid gets worse and worse into debt. I liked the main character, the stuff surrounding her, and the music a lot. But I didn't much care for all the parts that focused on her son. The subtitles were there but they literally flickered on and off, were slow compared to the dialogue, and sometimes turned almost translucent, so it was hard to read.


I had to buy more stuff for school and I need more clothing. My jacket isn't helping much here either because it's too big on me so the wind goes through it anyway. My bus pass was delivered though.

I went to the flea market and got old postcards, but other than that I've just been going to school. I made a study buddy from Britain but we haven't been able to get a study session going yet because he had to go to the eye doctor's, among other things, so his personal errands have become backlogged or something. He has an advantage over me because he studied Danish for at least a year before starting Icelandic, and then he also took formal classes for Icelandic back in the UK.

It's hard finding easy things to study from because even the simplest books for four year olds use all the more complicated grammar. I did find some comics online and I'm going to keep looking for fun stuff, for example these, which you can buy in English in bookstores too.