EmblaWhere Else to Look but Around: The Making of North Atlantic Cinema at Stockfish 2026 Olivia Popp May 2026 Festival Reports Issue 117 It was Reykjavík’s heaviest snowstorm since last October that initially delayed my arrival to the world’s northernmost capital for the 12th edition of Stockfish Film & Industry Festival, the country’s arthouse cinema event. “In Iceland, weather rules all,” my friend told me before I left, as I desperately hoped my trip wouldn’t get cancelled altogether. I soon experienced the strongest winds of my modestly well-travelled life. Snow ripped so violently through the air that, for short periods of time, it was impossible to open one’s eyes. Dögg Mósesdóttir, in her second year as Stockfish’s managing director, told me that such intense weather conditions often impact attendance levels, which are heavily dominated by local audiences. I went to Stockfish foolishly assuming I would find something about what the festival called “North Atlantic cinema,” as if I were some investigator trying to jigsaw together fragments of a mystery I didn’t yet understand. Instead, mirroring the nature of this very weather, I became swept up in elements I initially thought were not consequential, and suddenly became core to what I wanted to know. Notably, this year’s Stockfish only screened one Icelandic feature film, whereas the event’s annual focus was its showcase of Icelandic shorts: narrative, documentary, experimental, and music video. I’ll focus my thoughts largely on the discourse that flowed freely through the festival and animated my desire to explore what it means to speak about North Atlantic cinema at this moment. Joan of Arc Gazing at the land As I wandered the city, I repeatedly saw billboards advertising VR experiences requiring “no helicopter, no hiking” to marvel at Iceland’s natural beauty. I didn’t understand why one needed a screen to mediate their experience – why one would come all the way here just to sit on a chair and watch a monitor instead of experiencing the real thing. As perturbed as I felt to even see this exist, it spoke to a truth that the Icelandic film industry seems to be battling, according to an industry panel I attended and a few conversations I had. An Icelandic colleague once told me that 15 years ago people would ask her where Iceland was because they had never heard of it. It was as if it were Listenbourg, that fictional meme country off the coast of Portugal. Today, Iceland tops the bucket lists of millions worldwide. I first saw the country onscreen via Rúnar Rúnarsson’s third feature, Bergmál (Echo, 2019), which consists of 56 vignettes of everyday life between Christmas and New Year’s. As explored in a panel – fittingly also attended by Rúnarsson himself – the Icelandic film industry understands all too well the visual power and sway of its landscape. It also understands its economic value. Yet, a trap emerges if all that Icelandic film is destined to be is for the sake of creating tourist promotional material in a wolf’s arthouse fleece – and the industry knows that too. There seems to be a tension between championing Iceland’s cinema and being realistic about the state of its film industry. Largely underfunded by the government, it may be more developed than Greenland’s or the Faroe Islands’, but it’s still tiny when compared to Norway’s. However, Iceland’s film festivals are known for being uniquely locally engaged. For instance, during my time at Stockfish I was introduced to Skjaldborg’s Icelandic Documentary Film Festival, held in a 200-strong town, Patreksfjörður, which quadruples in size each year during Whitsun Weekend, with guests and locals marching through town in a huge parade. As we drove on the scenic Ring Road, festival staff and affiliates eagerly volunteered anecdotes of a place in which I had spent fewer than 24 hours and was keen to understand. Gazing at the land: ‘You see those buildings over there? That’s the aluminium factory that poisoned all these horses that used to graze around there.’ Then, peering at the water: ‘You have to go in the tunnel under that fjord there to get to my hometown.’ Finally: ‘I grew up near the old US military base—it used to be open on Halloween for the kids, and I would beg my parents to let me go.’ Physical places known by most who had grown up on the island, these landmarks dotting the horizon anchored their memories. The landscape also emerges as a frame of reference in Hlynur Pálmason’s Jóhanna af Örk (Joan of Arc, 2025), the companion film to his more mainstream Ástin Sem Eftir Er (The Love That Remains, 2025). The work stars Pálmason’s three teen and pre-teen children, who through the seasons build a mannequin out of wood and foam they dub Joan of Arc, and which they gradually tear down over several seasons more by shooting arrows at it. Finally, they burn it, only for the sculpture to awaken. As Pálmason shared in a Q&A after the film’s Icelandic premiere at Bío Paradís – the festival’s home and the country’s first and only arthouse cinema – he started creating Joan of Arc over two years before The Love that Remains, and incorporated footage from the former into the latter. He created a weatherproof camera house to fit his filming equipment, allowing the frame to remain entirely unchanged over the film’s 62-minute runtime. Pálmason frames his singular image such that there is a natural foreground, middle ground, and background formed in approximate thirds by the land, sea, and sky, respectively. However, by manipulating environmental aspects, he completely transforms the setting like a soundstage without ever shifting the camera, creating an overwhelming dynamism accompanied by a soaring synthesiser cover of Debussy’s “Clair de Lune.” Fog in the background obscures the ocean islands and the mountains, while light in different opacities and colours changes the tone of each layer. Grass, dirt, snow, ice, or a combination of the four alter the brightness and mood of the scene. The ocean’s waves can range from calm to tempestuous – or to frozen altogether. Through most of the film, the children are in the foreground playing with Joan. But when the ice freezes over, they wander onto the sea portion of the frame and shoot arrows toward the land, almost as if breaking the fourth wall or an unspoken rule dictating where onscreen they are allowed to travel. In The Love that Remains, the protagonist, Anna, is an artist who exposes large pieces of sheet metal to the elements, allowing them to rust over in different patterns (in reality, these pieces are the director’s own artworks). Pálmason toys with the interplay between human and nature, as well as transcendence of this boundary, without making it an extractive relationship. An entitled potential buyer tells Anna he would love to have his own place in Iceland as it’s so stunning and peaceful. What he views as a place he can own and exploit she sees as something that grants her the ability to make art using its ephemeral essence. Joan of Arc Searching for the North Atlantic While an impossible statement to make about Icelandic arthouse films writ large, both Joan of Arc and The Love that Remains allude to a connection between the country and its cinematic output that provided me with a first glimpse into an idea of North Atlantic cinema. This year’s Stockfish was one of the first meeting points for a new initiative known as the North Atlantic Story Circle (NASC), organised by Klaus Georg Hansen – an anthropologist by background, a producer by practice, and the current chair of the board of FILM.GL, Greenland’s film industry association. Composed of individuals from Greenland, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands, NASC aims to, in the loosest sense, shape the eponymous landscape. I asked Helene Granqvist, a Swedish producer at Nordic Factory and a NASC facilitator, how she characterised North Atlantic cinema. She referred to something I never would have expected, the snowstorm, which she said took centre stage at one of their sessions. Despite all three territories being heterogeneous, one element that connects them is the extreme weather, which impacts how everyone works, lives, and even speaks. She saw the three united under what she called a “holistic” look at filmmaking, one that takes into consideration elements outside the conventional bounds of what might be expected in a film economy. The ongoing refrain: what really connects the North Atlantic? Granqvist attributes the term ‘North Atlantic cinema’ to Hansen, who used the storm instead as a metaphor for the elephant in the room: the three territories sharing a history of Danish rule (Iceland formally ended the centuries-old occupation in 1944; the Faroe Islands and Greenland, in turn, remain self-governing territories under the Kingdom of Denmark). While a history of Danish colonialism is inherent, the NASC group explained, there is a necessary divorce from relying on the colonial narrative as a constant in the definition of North Atlantic cinema. Making North Atlantic cinema exclusively through the lens of Iceland, Greenland, and the Faroe Islands as former Danish colonies reinforces that very narrative sought to be dissolved, whereas it could be made in the name of something else entirely. A new strategy could be compared loosely to taking a decolonial, rather than postcolonial, approach to what North Atlantic cinema could be. Rather than exclusively seeking to view the three in reference to a colonial past, this new perspective seeks to disentangle them from coloniality – persistent structures of power and ways of thinking – while finding other touchpoints. For instance, this might include the discovery and making of unified creative perspectives that aligns the three external to the reliance on colonial history, thereby laying the groundwork for further cinematic collaboration in a forum such as NASC. Granqvist’s words and Pálmason’s films linger so fervently in my mind. Without critical reflection, leaning into this line of thinking around “holistic” filmmaking quickly borders on a generalised exoticisation of a people “in touch with the land” in a way that does not accurately reflect their lives. Yet, there emerges a certain “cinema of place,” especially when looking for first inspirations. A majority of short films coming out of Greenland today are documentaries about everyday life on the island: highly tangible subject matter, low setup required. The Faroe Islands’ only feature film of last year, Sakaris Stórá’s Det sidste paradis på jorden (The Last Paradise on Earth, 2025), sits along the same lines, reflecting a push-and-pull story about the protagonist’s love for the gorgeously shot Faroese town. Perhaps a better way to think about North Atlantic cinema is to think of it not as a simple definition, but instead, if we are to continue this decolonial thinking, as a counter-mapping exercise that unites a new oeuvre under an umbrella defined by the people who live there. These are very different places, and these filmmakers understand this way better than outsiders might. This is a group that has come together not because of something inherent and essentialised about their milieu, but because of an active choice to unite and preserve provincialism in global cinema. Granqvist suggested another way to think about this endeavour: “What will happen if we put the periphery in the centre?” Granqvist’s suggested geospatial reimagination poses a unique re-mapping of what it means for new generations of globally influenced filmmakers to create art originating in these places, such as the approximately 50,000-strong archipelago of the Faroe Islands. Two young Faroese filmmakers from NASC I spoke with had a vision of their national cinema as something bigger, perhaps even some sort of reflection of European and US commercial cinemas. They smiled and acknowledged the impact of The Last Paradise on Earth, but they also yearned for something beyond small-town stories. As the next generation of filmmakers, they should have the right to determine what their cinematic future is. That Greenland is now in the geopolitical spotlight has also profoundly changed how its cinema will be seen and its films will be made. Inunnguaq Petrussen, the head of the new Film Institute of Greenland, prefers to use the term “narrative sovereignty” to look at the future of Greenlandic cinema, a term often used by Indigenous communities and communities from the Global South to refer to the ability to control and shape their collective history. Sovereignty and storytelling are such intricately and intimately interwoven concepts, especially in countries with a history of colonial rule, that one cannot begin to think of a Greenlandic cinema or a North Atlantic cinema without falling back on this idea. Furthermore, the so-called region of the North Atlantic itself is still fluid. In a conversation I had with Petrussen, he pointed to inspirations to be drawn from Canadian Inuit film via Canada’s Indigenous Screen Office as well as from the Sámi Film Institute – perhaps foreshadowing what North Atlantic cinema might further be influenced by. As such, it is simultaneously an assertion of self-determination as it is a region-building effort, forecasting history with a lowercase ‘h’. Embla A tree brought to life In Katla Sólnes’ short film, Embla (2025) – which picked up two of the festival’s top awards – a lonely craftsman carves the titular woman out of wood and brings her to life in the process. In a dark spin on the tale of Pygmalion, the woodworker pushes away his beloved after she burns her finger in a candle in a bout of curiosity, leaving one blackened index finger he now regards as imperfect. Set in an undefined time before electricity, Sólnes’ film focuses intently on the materiality of the couple’s environment: the liquid sealant he brushes over her arm, the wave of their white linen clothing, and Embla’s fixation on the texture of the wild trees around the house, also made of wood. Embedded in Embla is a sort of twisted Adam and Eve myth, with the two as the film’s only characters and the candle as the forbidden fruit. The man takes his rage out on her, manifesting his self-obsession and fixation on perfection at the expense of all else. Stockfish’s short film competition is a playground for the newest generation of Icelandic filmmakers, and Embla is another example of how North Atlantic cinema might transform. Sólnes sticks firmly to this idea of being in touch with a cinema of place while also being heavily influenced by conversations and topics that have burned brightly over the last few years, including justice for systemic patriarchal violence of all forms. Her own biography testifies to those concerns: her work is “environmentally-driven, juxtaposing intimate and complex relationship stories against the volatile landscape of Iceland.” Currently in development, the young writer-director’s first feature, Eruption, is similarly billed as a work that draws from Iceland’s corporeality – to co-opt a term typically reserved for animate objects – to craft a psychological exploration of relationships, feminism, and desire. I have never been to a festival where the history of its country’s cinema has not yet been mapped out; so many national cinemas that I know and love have been rigorously defined and redefined. To me, what is so interesting about this moment is that we can’t retroactively or retrospectively validate our assertions the way we would in an academic practice of canonical film history. Even though Icelandic cinema has existed since the mid-20th century, its small output has not engendered the making of an extensive Icelandic film history. The cases of Greenland and the Faroe Islands remain self-explanatory. Right now, North Atlantic cinema refers to a deliberately unfinished concept, to be made intentionally, iteratively, and inventively. It is a beautiful coincidence that both Embla and Joan of Arc centre a wooden, humanoid sculpture that comes to life. In Joan of Arc, the wooden sculpture is fastened to a large post – a tree trunk “replanted” into the ground. Like the storm, the tree becomes its own fortuitous symbol. Iceland was heavily deforested when it was settled 1100 years ago; its small, native trees—largely birch—have slowly regrown, but Iceland is still known as a land light in woodland. One of the festival panels suggested a grim but humorous metaphor. The Icelandic film industry is like the country’s trees: understood and loved by the locals, but stepped on and ignored by outsiders who mistake them for shrubs. Stockfish, in this light, may very well become the place where North Atlantic cinema can be freely defined and redefined for those makers of history—or at least, it will be a rich starting point. An Icelandic colleague told me an age-old joke: “If you’re lost in an Icelandic forest, just stand up.” Stockfish Film and Industry Festival 19 – 29 March 2026 https://stockfishfestival.is/en
