3,500 people watched the film outside

The film Northern Comfort, directed by Hafsteinn Gunnar Sigurðsson, was recently screened before 3,500 spectators in the open air in Transylvania in Romania.

The film was there as the opening film at the TIFF Film Festival, which now ended this weekend.

The film has been well received, according to Sigurðsson, and it has been widely screened at film festivals since its premiere at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas, USA last March.

“The film will be shown at festivals this summer and then go on general release in France in August. It’s the first country to put it in the theaters,” Sigurðsson tells mbl.is.

The movie will premiere in Iceland on September 15, but the film has additionally been sold to all the Nordic countries, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Australia, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Poland, as well as other countries.

In the new year, the film will be screened on Netflix in the UK, Sigurðsson reports.

The idea was born 15 years ago

The movie is described as a black comedy about a group of people on a fear-of-flying course, who are going on a trip to Iceland. The movie is in English.

Sigurðsson wrote the screenplay for the film with Dori DNA and Tobias Munthe. However, the concept of the film was born 15 years ago, when Sigurðsson was a student at a film school in New York, USA.

“Someone close to me was very afraid of flying. I heard about this kind of fear of flying course, where people go under the guidance of a psychologist in a group therapy. The course then ends with a back and forth flight. I thought it was a very charged situation that could expose the most vulnerable aspects of people,” Sigurðsson says.

Everything involving airplanes is costly

What is it like to do a comedy in English?

“Of course it’s a challenge, but thankfully we had a British screenwriter on our team. It was absolutely necessary to have someone who speaks the language as a first language on the team, so I felt that I would get the nuances in the dialogue that you may not have yourself.”

He says everything involving airplanes is both very complicated and costly in films. “The film is expensive by nature. It is shot in three countries and is shot in a big international airport. The production of the set had to be built. In fact, it might have been difficult to make it in Icelandic because Icelandic films can only get a certain amount of financing. Once you get to the English market, access to bigger players and increased funding will open up,” he says.

Wonderful to work with Spall

Timothy Spall, one of the best-known British film actors, is the lead in the film. He may be best known in this country for playing Peter Pettigrew in the Harry Potter films.

What is it like working with Timothy Spall?

“It’s absolutely wonderful. He’s an amazing human being and a humble man and an artist I greatly respect. It was just so wonderful to meet him and to work with him. A very good friendship came out of us working together. Furthermore, all the other actors were also outstanding and a pleasure to work with. They were an awesome group that really worked well together, and that was not a given since they all come from different places.”

As mentioned earlier, the film will be screened in Iceland on September 15. The film’s producer is Grímar Jónsson at Netop Films in Iceland (Hrútar, Under the Tree, Goðheimar, Héraðið) in co-production with One Two Films in Germany and Good Chaos in the UK.