Godland

Hlynur Pálmason's Godland premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2022 in the Un Certain Regard strand, the Icelandic writer-director's third feature, after Winter Brothers (2017) and A White, White Day (2019), and his most ambitious project to date. The film is a Danish / Icelandic / French / Swedish co-production by Snowglobe, Join Motion Pictures, Maneki Films and Garagefilm International. Pálmason and his cinematographer Maria von Hausswolff drew the project's central conceit from a set of seven actual wet-plate photographs that Pálmason discovered in the National Museum of Iceland, early documentary records made by a Danish priest sent to Iceland in the late nineteenth century.

Elliott Crosset Hove, in his second collaboration with Pálmason, leads as Lucas, with Ingvar E. Sigurðsson (A White, White Day) as Ragnar and Vic Carmen Sonne (Holiday) as Anna. Cinematographer Maria von Hausswolff shoots the entire film in a 1.33:1 boxed Academy ratio with rounded corners, evoking both the wet-plate photographic process at the centre of the film and the period silent-film register; the score is by the Icelandic experimental composer Alex Zhang Hungtai. Volcanic and glacial sequences were filmed across multiple seasons over two years, allowing the natural landscape to genuinely change between scenes.

Critical reception was emphatic: The New York Times, The Guardian and Sight & Sound placed the film among the year's strongest, and the Criterion Collection issued an edition in 2023, exceptional for a contemporary feature only one year after its festival premiere. Godland won the Edda Award for Best Director and the Gold Hugo at the Chicago International Film Festival, and is now widely cited as one of the most distinctive Nordic features of the decade.