A single scene in Godland took two years to film. It’s worth the wait

Icelandic director Hlynur Palmason likes to play a long game. A sequence showing the decaying corpse of a dead horse in Godland, his latest film, took two years to complete as the body disintegrated in real time, rotting in summer and snap-freezing in winter. Meanwhile, he shot other footage of the changing seasons, sometimes with the cast and sometimes on his own.

“I love doing that,” he says. “Because when you have a camera in the trunk of the car filming a little bit whenever you drive around, it reminds you you’re a filmmaker. You may not have the film financed and you maybe don’t know if it’s going to turn into something, but it makes you think about the film.” In fact, he thinks about several films. “I always work on a couple of projects in parallel, but over a period of years.”

Palmason lives in Hofn, population 2200, in Iceland’s desolate east. It’s a long way from Reykjavik, with its hyper-modern film and sound studios; it’s a long way from anywhere but he knows, after studying and spending years in Denmark, that he belongs here. He shot his last two films – A White, White Day and now the riveting, powerful Godland – in what he calls his back garden: an unforgiving volcanic landscape often blurred by rain, sleet and snow.

The new film is set in the 1870s, by Palmason’s vague estimation. Lucas, a young Lutheran priest – played by Palmason regular Elliott Crosset Hove, whose endemic intensity here readily translates as fanaticism – arrives from Denmark to establish a new parish in a remote coastal farming district. He arrives with an entourage, equipment that includes a large-format camera, and a tremendous sense of superiority.

For anyone less puffed up with hubris, it would make sense to make his way to his new posting by boat. Lucas has a grand plan to travel overland, meeting his new flock and photographing them. “It’s an ideal, but it doesn’t go very well because he doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” says Palmason.

His guide Ragnar (Ingvar Sigurdsson), “who is almost like he was born in the ground – he knows the rivers, he knows the weather”, warns against the dangers of this pointlessly arduous journey, but Lucas cannot be deterred. Ragnar doesn’t refuse either, when it comes to it. In this clash of cultures – Denmark being hated as Iceland’s colonial masters, Icelanders despised by Danes as dirty, smelly and barbaric – neither is willing to lose face. Their mutual hostility is heightened by the fact that only one member of travelling party – an overworked translator – speaks both languages. The translator tries to drill Lucas in Icelandic as they plod on horseback across the sphagnum, but he can’t retain a single word.

The script went through many mutations – some of which surprised even their author – long before Palmason began photographing the horse. Early on, he fixed on a priest as a foil for Ragnar, mountain man, but for a long time he had no idea whether he should be Catholic or Protestant.

“There was a battle between these churches. The interesting thing was you have both the Lutherans and the Catholics trying to get these heathen people into church, because a big part of Iceland was still heathen. Things were changing fast, but [Iceland] was only now getting more in touch with the modern world, which it had definitely not been part of.” He eventually settled for a Lutheran.

“But it didn’t work for me until he had a camera, which he didn’t have in the beginning,” Palmason continues. “When he had a camera, suddenly it started being interesting for me to do it. I think it was something about seeing it through his lens or him experiencing the place and trying to portray it in a way, making his own version of it, as we all do. I think I found that interesting because he was a foreigner.”

The photographs themselves are presented at the beginning of the film as supposed relics of an expedition, recently recovered. Frosty-bearded men are shown looking grimly at an unseen photographer. “They became one of the drives in the writing. What would this photo look like? What was the situation behind it? What were they doing? Are they alone? All these thoughts are so much more fun if you have an object to focus on.”

He chose to shoot the film in Academy ratio, meaning the image on screen is almost square – a decision that seems counter-intuitive in a country of vast, broad landscapes, but heightens the sense of authentic peril.

“My previous film, A White White Day, was a wider format: Super 35,” says Palmason. “There were things I liked about it and things that really irritated me. I had a lot of trouble getting close to a face. And while I knew I had a lot of landscape in this film, I knew I needed to be very close to faces at certain moments. So I started testing and fell in love with this. It’s 4:5 so you are using the whole of the negative – I even shot the black bar surrounding it, so you kind of have a frame around the image. It also seems to me more intimate and focused, which the film really needed.”

Curiously, the film has three names. In Icelandic, it is called Volada Land; in Danish, Vanskabte Land. Volada means wretched or deformed; Volada Land was the title of a poem by Matthias Jochumsson, a 19th-century clergyman and poet who returned from studying in Denmark to an especially horrific winter and wrote it as a “hate poem” to his apocalyptically hostile homeland. A public backlash followed when one of his friends published it.

“He got cancelled, if you think about it as today,” says Palmason. “To the point where he had to write a flipside to it: a love poem.”

He sees his own film as reflecting both, but he cites another inspiration that goes to the heart of the matter. “An incredible quote that I don’t use in the film, but thought about a lot when I was making it,” he says. “It goes ‘Here, you are abandoned by everyone but God. But God doesn’t exist.’ And when Lucas is there, all alone, that’s kind of my feeling for him.”

Godland is in cinemas from August 17.

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