When the Light Breaks

Rúnar Rúnarsson's When the Light Breaks opened the Un Certain Regard sidebar of the 77th Cannes Film Festival in May 2024, the first Icelandic film to do so. It is the writer-director's fourth feature, after Volcano (2011, also a Cannes Directors' Fortnight title), Sparrows (2015) and Echo (2019), and a five-country co-production led by Iceland's Halibut and the Netherlands' Lemming Film. The film is set across a single twenty-four-hour stretch in Reykjavík, deliberately scheduled around the city's near-perpetual summer daylight.

Elín Hall (The Falcons) leads as Una, with Mikael Kaaber and Katla Njálsdóttir as her friends. Cinematographer Sophia Olsson, who shot Joachim Trier's Louder Than Bombs and Reprise, works in widescreen long takes that linger on faces and Icelandic light; the running time, at just under eighty minutes, is unusually compact for a continental drama and is matched to the real-time structure. The original songs are by the Reykjavík musician Kristín Anna Valtýsdóttir.

The film won the Dragon Award for Best Nordic Film at Göteborg in 2025, swept the Icelandic Edda Awards for Film of the Year, Director and Actress, and was nominated for the European Film Award's European Discovery prize. Reviews in Variety, Screen International and The Hollywood Reporter received it as a quiet, formally rigorous study of communal grief, and as further confirmation of Rúnarsson's place in the small but influential current of Icelandic festival cinema.