On a ‘forced summer exile’ to a farm a young Icelandic girl begins to realise that the adult world is far more complicated and callous than she has ever anticipated.
The story follows Sól, a 9-year-old girl who is sent to distant relatives for a summer to work and to mature at their countryside farm. For Sól there is an added element: she's been sent away to the farm as punishment for shoplifting, and because her parents have split. The animals charm her, and she befriends a mysterious farmhand. The more acquainted she becomes with the ways of the farm, though, the more contradictions she notices, especially the uncle and aunt’s constant claim that nature’s laws are the reasons for their actions.
“In the film, the farmer and his wife stand for the very human desire to "keep house" in the wilderness that is human nature, whereas the farmhand stands for the opposite: a life of chaos and emotional freedom. This conflict is one of the main threads in the film, and one that both the girl and the farmers' daughter are struggling with; this conflict between wanting to be “normal” versus facing your true, complicated nature.” (Ása Helga Hjörleifsdóttir)
Ása Helga Hjörleifsdóttir
Born in 1984 in Reykjavík. Graduate of the Columbia University Film MFA program. She taught screenwriting at the Columbia University Undergraduate Film Department. She also holds a BA in comparative literature from the University of Iceland and the Sorbonne – Paris IV University. After graduating she worked as a freelance book and film critic. Her first feature film, The Swan, is an adaptation of a novel by Guðbergur Bergsson.
The Swan Svanurinn
What's On
Wisdom of Happiness Wisdom of Happiness
Barbara Miller, Philip Delaquis
Tuesday, 23. 09. 2025 / 15:30 / Main Hall
With disarming wit, the Dalai Lama reflects on balancing millennia-old Tibetan Buddhist traditions with the contemporary values of our globalised society that now struggles to overcome violence and war while standing on the brink of environmental collapse.
Fiume o morte! Fiume o morte!
Igor Bezinović
Tuesday, 23. 09. 2025 / 16:30 / Small Hall
On 12 September 1919, a troop of some three hundred soldiers under the leadership of the flamboyant war-loving Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio swooped into the Northern-Adriatic port town of Fiume, now Rijeka, wanting to annex the city to Italy. Over the course of the next 16 months, during what is regarded as one of the most bizarre militant sieges of all time his official photography team captured over 10,000 images. A century later, Igor Bezinović orchestrates a direct-action history lesson focused on the siege and its modern-day implications.
Love Is Not an Orange Love Is Not an Orange
Otilia Babara
Tuesday, 23. 09. 2025 / 17:30 / Main Hall
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Moldovan women left in droves for work in Western Europe, leaving their children to be cared for by their relatives. They sent money and other goods home, and in return, their children sent videotaped messages. These intimate recordings testify to the painful void left in the lives of children by mothers forced to leave their homeland to provide a better life for their families.
