Heavenly Journey

Icelandic writer-director Hlynur Pálmason introduces us to the dark and light of his stunning 19th-century drama Godland, which follows a Danish priest’s epic journey to Iceland

Interview: Josh Slater-Williams

Earning valid comparisons to classic arduous cinematic journeys through wilderness such as Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo, writer-director Hlynur Pálmason’s Godland is one of those films that looks like it might have been as much a nightmare to make as the in-film journey is for its protagonist.

Luckily for his cast and crew, it appears this was not the case. “It’s a lot of fun and laughing alongside a lot of hard work,” the Iceland native says of the production. It seems that much of the “blood, sweat, crying and everything” may actually have come before principal photography began. “I do need to have the film inside for a while,” he says, “bubbling in the system to process it all. But it’s a good creative struggle and conflict because I’m working with people I really love.”

Set in the late 1800s, Godland follows the misfortunes of Danish Lutheran priest Lucas

(Elliott Crosset Hove), who’s tasked with travelling to Iceland to build a church at a Danish settlement – Iceland being a Danish territory at that point in time. Bringing a complicated camera setup with him, he intends to document the land and its people on his long route to the settlement. An opening title card claims that “a box was found in Iceland with seven wet plate photographs taken by a Danish priest. These images are the first photographs of the southeast coast. This film is inspired by these photographs.” According to Pálmason, however, this is a cheeky, Fargo-esque fabrication with no actual basis in truth. It’s a fictional device he came up with just to get the story going; those photos never existed.

What does actually exist is the complicated history that informs the character dynamics of the mostly Iceland and Denmark-funded production. During the trek across Iceland, Lucas is frequently at odds with his native guide, Ragnar (Ingvar Sigurðsson, the star of Pálmason’s A White, White Day), who doesn’t trust Danish people and resents learning the language. This provides considerable drama when Lucas’s translator (Hilmar Guðjónsson) is taken out of the picture thanks to the priest’s own act of hubris.

“Iceland was under the Danish crown for a long time,” Pálmason tells us. “And we got independence in a very undramatic way. Not one drop of blood was spilt during this process, so it’s not like this dramatic thing that everybody knows. It’s something that happened in a very effortless way, but it’s still an interesting process and there still is a very deep and interesting story between the two countries. And it’s a story that is both positive and negative. On both sides, there are good things and bad.”

Although Godland is a work of historical fiction, it proved to be Pálmason’s most personal feature to date, following the aforementioned A White, White Day and breakthrough Winter Brothers. “Being raised in Iceland and living in Denmark for many years, studying and having children and moving back home to Iceland, I have felt sometimes that I’m in between two countries,” he explains. “Someone in Denmark would say, ‘Oh, he’s an Icelandic filmmaker.’ And someone in Iceland would say, ‘Oh, he’s making Danish films.’ I wanted to explore that: take these two countries, put them together like opposites and work with that. And not only in historical terms, but with dialogue and these two different languages; the misunderstanding, miscommunication and these two very different characters, the Danish priest and the Icelandic guide.” Appropriately, Godland features separate title cards – one Danish and one Icelandic – at the film’s opening and its close.

Godland is a tale of two countries but also a film of two halves, the Danish settlement they reach being a source of claustrophobic tension and dark comedy. A throughline of both dark and light in both halves is Ragnar the translator, with Sigurðsson – last seen by UK viewers in Robert Eggers’ The Northman – continuing an actor-director relationship that dates back to Pálmason’s film school days. “I did a short [school finals] film called A Painter and he was the main actor,” Pálmason says. “And the one who was playing against him was actually Elliott, who plays the priest [in Godland]. This is me putting them together in a film again.”

Godland is released 7 Apr by Curzon