This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Privacy Overview
Strictly Necessary Cookies
Strictly Necessary Cookie should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings.
If you disable this cookie, we will not be able to save your preferences. This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again.
3rd Party Cookies
This website uses Google Analytics to collect anonymous information such as the number of visitors to the site, and the most popular pages.
Keeping this cookie enabled helps us to improve our website.
Please enable Strictly Necessary Cookies first so that we can save your preferences!
Director's Statement
One of the big, controversial issues in Iceland is the radical change in the official fishing policies set some years ago which brought great trauma and confusion within the smaller villages alt around the Icelandic coast and immensity disturbed the infra-structure of the Icelandic society. One by one the fishing villages around the coast have been loosing quotas to the bigger companies in the capital and the inhabitants have been flocking away from those places, leaving behind their worthless houses and half empty fishing plants. Most of the people that have stayed behind are immigrants from Asia and Eastern Europe who have somehow got stuck there. These changes were brought about by a "quota system" set by the official authorities.
This is quite a complicated system and very contradictory to say the least When the system was legalized, the "quota rights" ware basically given out to a certain number of people and fishing industries according to their recent "track record" at sea; i.e. according to how active they had been in terms of quantity of fish pulled out of sea for a certain period of time prior to the execution of this legislation.
This crisis is basically the Background of the film; where set. THE SEA takes place in one of those fishing villages on the East Coast of Iceland; a village that used to be a vivid, efficient fishing village, basically run by one man, Thordur, the owner of the bus,-fishing plant The semi-retired, tyrannical, hard working Thordur who has been "king" in the village (and in his family too) for many decades as the owner of the fishing plant, is fighting against his elder son who would like his father to submit to the new economical and technical realities...
The film tells the conflict between members of a family where a tyrant father, who has suppressed all the other members for such a long time, has to face a show-down when he has gathered the whole family together for a family least.
THE SEA was shot an location in Neskaupstadur, one of those places where the traces of "the golden days" have been fading over the last lo years or so. In the magnificent fjord which is surrounded by beautiful mountains, the small houses and run-down factories form a great contrast that I wanted to use specifically in telling this story.