INTERVIEW: Police chief investigates his late wife’s affair in new Icelandic thriller
Photo: Ingvar Sigurdsson and Ída Mekkín Hlynsdóttir star in A White, White Day. Photo courtesy of Film Movement / Provided by Foundry Comm with permission.
A White, White Day, written and directed by Hlynur Palmason, follows an off-duty police chief by the name of Ingimundur (Cannes winner Ingvar Sigurdsson), who lives in a small, isolated town in rural Iceland. After his wife dies, he begins to suspect that she had been having an affair with a local man. This revelation drives Ingimundur to start investigating and piecing together the puzzle, trying to figure out what went wrong with his marriage.
Eventually Ingimundur takes his searching to an uncomfortable level of obsession that begins to alienate him from society and scare his loved ones, but with no concrete answers, he continues on — pursuing and obsessing, pursuing and obsessing.
A White, White Day was supposed to be released theatrically in the United States, but due to the coronavirus pandemic, it has recently premiered on Film Movement’s Virtual Cinema showcase.
“I think sometimes it’s difficult to find exactly where it started, but I remember a trigger,” Palmason said in a recent phone interview about the origins of the project. “I was working on a photography series called A White Day where I was photographing during a snowstorm. I was photographing both landscapes and figures. … And I remember while doing that, I heard this very peculiar quote, a quote from an unknown source saying that, ‘When everything is white, and the earth and the skies become one, you can talk to the people that have passed away.’ That was one of the triggers that led the project to start to emerge slowly.”
When Palmason writes a script, he likes to have a particular actor in mind for the protagonist role. For A White, White Day, that meant even before the full story was on the paper, he had enlisted the help of Sigurdsson, who is best known for Everest, Justice League, Succession and Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, in addition to many Icelandic projects.
“I do early on find out who I’m writing for,” the director said. “I always try to have my actors on the project before I start writing. I did write for him, for this actor, Ingvar, so he was there from the beginning. I knew him very well, and we explored him together.”
Palmason sees this central character as having lost half of himself — the better half. Now he finds himself away from his wife forever, away from his work, away from his memories and searching for a purpose in life.
“I think everybody wants to be seen and be part of something and be loved, and I think he sort of lost his most important person in the world,” Palmason said. “I think he’s sort of trying to cope with that and not being sure how to do that or what he’s doing. I think it was an interesting place to be, something worth exploring, something that I was intrigued by. … I think life is this strange balance of beauty and brutality, dark and cold, or bitter and sweet. If something is dear to you, if you really love something, there’s a greater chance of you being hurt or you experiencing great loss. I think that’s interesting in a way.”
Before production began on A White, White Day, Palmason had been living with his family in Denmark. For this project, he wanted to write, research and eventually film in his hometown in southeastern Iceland, so he moved his family back to his roots, back to where he grew up.
“Me and the family did move back to our hometown and began working on it, so it’s actually shot in the southeast coast of Iceland where I grew up,” he said. “It’s a very familiar place. … I’ve always been drawn by the seasons and the weather. I’ve always felt that life without seasons would be a pretty difficult life to live. I find it very stimulating, and I love the way that things die during the winter and come back to life during spring. There’s a lot of things with the seasons that I’m interested in, and when you know a place very well — and you grew up there, and it’s sort of inside you in a way — it’s easier for you. I’m a kind of a writer who really needs to know what location or what space I’m writing for, otherwise my stories have difficulty emerging and finding a place. So very, very early in the process of writing and researching, I begin to explore ideas of locations and spaces to film it in.”
Although this global pandemic has turned the world upside down and greatly impacted the movie business, including the release of A White, White Day, Palmason’s life has been relatively unchanged these past few weeks. His town is so isolated that there’s not much of a physical connection to the outside world.
“My town is the most isolated town in Iceland,” the director said. “I think the distance to the next cinema is 500 kilometers or 400 kilometers, so it’s quite isolated. So for me things are quite the same, to be honest. Things do not change that much here, but, of course, you always want the best for your film. I’m very fond of A White, White Day. How can I say, it’s very close to my heart. That sounds sentimental, but I want the best for it. We wanted the best possible distribution around the world, but I think we have to deal with the situation in some way. I think it’s the right decision and the right approach to try to get the film out in another way. I think the distributors are being creative, and that’s very good. I would like to add that I do think A White, White Day, the experience is best, of course, in the cinema. We really made it for the cinema, so that, of course, would have been the right way to experience the film.”
One day — one white, white day — Palmason will have this wish for his film granted.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
A White, White Day, written and directed by Hlynur Palmason, is now available to stream from Film Movement. Click here for more information.
