Vefurinn Real Screen sem snýst um heimildamyndir, fjallar um Out of Thin Air, heimildamyndina um Guðmundar- og Geirfinnsmálið sem frumsýnd er á Hot Docs hátíðinni og ræðir við framleiðandann og sálfræðinginn Andy Glynne.
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Glynne was instantly gripped by the murders when he first read about them on a BBC website.
With its frigid, rocky countryside and small population, Iceland represents a bygone era where everyone knows everyone, he says, adding, “It’s a country with a small-town ‘Fargo’ sensibility.”
But it wasn’t just the true crime aspect that grabbed his attention: The story, he says, is “fascinating in itself — psychology of memory. What is real and what isn’t real?”
It proved a difficult film to make, in part because the story is so dense. With the trend towards serialized docs like Netflix’s Making a Murderer, Glynne thought this project could easily morph into a 10-part series. But, as a feature doc, the challenge became distilling all the twists and turns into a single narrative.
“What we were trying to do is not make this into a miscarriage-of-justice story. It wasn’t a forensic, investigative, journalistic film. We’re not trying to come to conclusions of who did what, guilty or not guilty. What we really wanted it about was memory and the fallibility of memory,” says Glynne.
When interviewing people — 24 in all — the team strove to stay neutral on people’s guilt or innocence, which Glynne says helped them maintain good relationships with the subjects because they didn’t have an agenda.
“I think creatively it helped us keep focus of what the film was about; with such a dense subject matter its easy to get lost in the detail.”
Glynne says the starkly beautiful landscape of Iceland also plays a prominent role of the film – almost a character in itself. To that end, cinematographer Bergsteinn Bjorgulfsson was brought on board to help craft the narrative tone through sweeping shots of the landscape.
Music is also integral, adding a subtle, melancholic vibe to the film. Looking for a Nordic minimalist aesthetic, Glynne turned to BAFTA-award winning instrumentalist and producer Ólafur Arnalds, who also did the score and end credits for ITV’s Broadchurch in 2013.
Sjá nánar hér: Hot Docs ’17: Memory questioned in “Out of Thin Air”
