Godland is both a love and a hate letter and a to Iceland and the country that colonized it. A Danish priest is challenged when seeking to set up a parish in the harsh Icelandic landscape in the late 19^th century and languages and cultures clash. The film is presented in the un certain regard section in Cannes.

“I am Icelandic, and I grew up in Iceland, but I lived in Denmark for a long time and I brought up my children there, so I am kind of in between countries,” explains director Hlynur Palmason about his film Godland, which explores a Dane’s first meeting with Iceland. “Until the second world war, we were under the Danish crown. So, there is a lot of history there. I wanted to work with the opposites between Denmark and Iceland not only in historical terms, but also in terms of language and the miscommunication between these people.”

The film follows the idealistic Lutheran priest Lucas (Elliott Crosset Hove) when he is sent to Iceland by the Church of Denmark at the end of the 19^th century to establish a parish and erect a church. Initially, he has a romantic idea of learning the language and exploring the countryside of this beautiful but harsh country, but he soon discovers that Iceland is nothing like what he thought it would be and that he has a hard time coping here.

“It is a fictional story,” says Hlynur Palmason from the Scandinavian House in Cannes. “I created a Lutheran priest maybe because I was brought up a Lutheran. I am not religious, but the Lutheran church was having a conflict with the Catholic church during that time, but a big part of Iceland was still heathen, so they were trying to get them in the right church, so there is rich history within that.”

Hating and Loving Iceland

While Lucas is travelling across the country in Godland, he does it with the help of the local man, Ragnar (Ingvar Sigurðsson). On the way, he discovers that he is not able to deal with the natural challenges in the same way as Ragnar, and a hate and love relationship develops between the men. Lucas loses his interest and appreciation of the Icelandic culture as represented by Ragnar, whose interest in speaking the Danish language which he masters to some degree, is lacking and thus the two men hardly comprehend each other. At one point Lucas reaches out to God for help: “It is not going as planned, I can’t go any further,” he says as his body is giving up and he seems to be about to lose his mind.

The story of the film was inspired by a poem by Icelandic poet Matthías Jochumsson and the Icelandic title of the film is the same as the title of the poem: Volaða Land. The poem was not well received in Iceland.

“He studied in Denmark,” says Hlynur Palmason about the poet. “He then moved back to Iceland, settled up north and experienced a crazy cold winter there, where the whole fjord froze up and kept frozen until late summer, so it did not even have a chance to melt before the next winter. So, he wrote this hate poem about Iceland and the poem is called Volaða. Land, where he ‘shit talks’ Iceland for a long time and he basically says that it is unlivable, it is unforgiving and terrible. It is a shitty land.”

Barely surviving the trip, Lucas does reach his destination with Ragnar’s help and stays at the fellow Dane Carl’s (Jacob Hauberg Lohmann) house, where he recovers. Carl has two daughters; the teenager Anna (Vic Carmen Sonne) and the younger Ida (Ída Mekkín Hlynsdóttir), who befriend Lucas and shows him the more hospitable side of Iceland as fellow Danes, who have learned to cope in the country – this is especially the case for Ida, who is at home with both nature and animals.

“All the characters in the film are either Danish or Icelandic, but Ida is like standing in the middle with a line through her,” says Hlynur Palmason, whose own daughter Ida plays the youngest daughter in the film. “She represents the better part of both.”

Exploring Iceland

Godland is filmed in the Academy ratio, on 35mm by cinematographer Maria von Hausswolff. Despite being filmed in the narrow ratio, it captures the harsh and unforgiving nature of Iceland in an anthropological way and evokes the photographs that Lucas is taking of the Icelandic people he meets.

“When you go less wide, it can also become more intimate in a way,” says Hlynur Palmason on his choice for a square format. “I am always testing a new format and it was very natural to frame it that way. I had difficulties in my previous film A White, White Day getting close to the faces and creating a portrait and in Godland, I wanted to get really close to the faces. Not in every scene, but when I get close, it is supposed to mean something.”

Godland is an epic film and has elements of the western genre.

“I hear a lot that it has a western feel to it,” says the director. “I don’t know what it is, but it is probably because of the world around them – the environment is like a character in the films and helps you see the interior of the characters.”

Hlynur Palmason likes exploring time passing, watching the seasons change and how time passes for the living and dead. In A White, White Day, which premiered in Cannes in 2019, there was a montage as a prologue to reflect this: He filmed the changes around a house for two years of different seasons. In Godland, he shows a body of a horse decomposing through shots taken over time. The character Lucas’ remains is also found by Ida and is seen becoming part of the Icelandic earth.

“One of the most important things in the film is the beauty and brutality of the seasons – the living and dying and time is very good at underlying that without of it being a message, but it is just a feeling. When Ida the girl sees him as bare bones, it would be hard for me to do that scene without us experiencing it. Thus, I need to build up the scene.”