"with a truck and a dip"
On the occasion of exactly four decades having passed since the Icelandic/Swedish Viking film The Raven Flies
directed by Hrafn Gunnlaugsson premiered in Iceland to the great admiration of tens of thousands of moviegoers,
It seems fitting to bring it back to the attention of film lovers in this country.
And it will be done with a bang, as it should be, but the band Sólstafir will
repeat the game from ten years ago, on the film's thirtieth anniversary, when it premiered its own
composition in a dynamic way to the film by RIFF. The band members will therefore step back on
stok, this time in Hall 1 at Háskólabíó and promise no less rock than when they entertained their guests in
The hall in Kópavogur in the fall of 2014.
"It's a film of mine," says the director himself, but it is still being shown to this day.
around the world. “I guess you can’t say it’s timeless,” he adds.
The Raven Flies attracted a lot of attention and discussion at the time, and in fact before it was released.
public, because the costumes and props had already raised the eyebrows of the countrymen, who looked on
some wonder at the ancient methods used in leatherworking and metalworking that
were subject to the laws of the colonial era in every way. The film also had no lack of ambition.
themselves, but there the caves and caves under the Eyjafjöll mountains played a big role.
“It was a huge undertaking,” recalls Hrafn. “For me, it was non-stop work for three years.”
The film tells the story of an Irish man who travels to Iceland on a mission to take revenge on the Vikings.
who had killed his parents and kidnapped his sister when he was a child – and raised the
attention beyond the borders, especially among our kin nations in the Nordic countries where memory from
The film, such as "Heavy Knife", still lives on in the minds of people.
Here it seemed a spaghetti westerner in a Viking costume had arrived, somewhat in the spirit of the movie giants Akira
Kurosawa and Sergio Leone, where the folktale of heroic nature and
thirst for revenge, but the characterization and interpretation of the main actors in the film was consequently fiercely
The leading figures were Egill Ólafsson and Helgi Skúlason, along with Edda Björgvinsdóttir, Flosi
Ólafsson and Jakob Þór Einarsson who played the Irish newcomer.
A good decade and a half after the premiere of The Raven, it was estimated that around seventy thousand people
had seen the film in cinemas around the country, making it one of the ten most popular
Icelandic cinema towards the end of the last century, a period that has generally been called the Icelandic
the movie spring.
“There are still active fan clubs for the film abroad,” Hrafn points out. “I was once
I was invited to one of them, which is in Murmansk, from all corners of the world. I accepted it now, and had
fun, if only because the club chairman turned out to be the prison warden
"The city's vice-chairman and the police chief of Murmansk himself," says Hrafn Gunnlaugsson.
finally.
