Reykjavík Grapevine - 24.08.2018, Blaðsíða 18

“We are so imperfect,” director
Baldvin Z says carefully, focused
entirely on choosing the right
words. “We make so many bad
decisions in our lives and I am
fascinated by them. Our human
side is so flawed. I think that’s the
element I am always searching for.”
This theme was dissected inti-
mately in his most famous work,
2014’s ‘Vonarstæti’, but he returns
to it now in his newest piece, ‘Lóf
mér að falla’ (‘Let Me Fall’), which
explores the phenomenon and
aftermath of Iceland’s mid-2000s
‘týndu stúlkurnar’ (‘lost girls’).
Where are they?
‘Lost girls’ is an anglicization of
an epidemic that rocked the mid-
2000s in Iceland, where teen-
age girls began to vanish into the
ether. “It was so strange to see
this every week in the paper. She
is missing. Now she is missing,”
Baldvin says. “I always wondered,
where are they? We are on a tiny
island so it’s not like they are
gone forever. What is going on?”
It was only brought to light years
later that these girls had become
swept up into the underworld of
Icelandic society—engulfed in
drugs, homelessness, and prosti-
tution—so much so that they were
effectively untraceable. In a number
of exposés and interviews in Icelan-
dic newspapers in years since, girls
who had gotten out of that lifestyle
told fragments of their stories.
That said, the intimate details
surrounding their lives are still
somewhat under wraps. There is
not much written on the internet or
academic papers and much of what
Icelanders know is simply hearsay.
A few years ago, Baldvin came
into contact with diaries from a
‘lost girl’ who has since died. “These
diaries were 13 or 14 years old and
they were so mind-blowing in
many ways,” he explains. He then
connected with three women who
had also been caught up in that
lifestyle and interviewed them.
“When they started to tell us what
they were doing, we just couldn’t
believe it,” Baldvin says, visibly
incredulous. “There is a world
of human trafficking in Iceland,
which is different than the US, but
it is here. They are trafficking girls
for drugs, prostitution, and money.”
A proclivity to extremity
Baldvin believes much of this dark-
ness relates back to the Icelandic
psyche, which he says naturally
drifts towards extremity. “In the
diary, the girl writes herself, ‘If I am
going to be an addict, I am gonna
be the best one,’” Baldvin relays. “It
is in our upbringing or something.
We don’t do anything half-way. We
must do everything all the way.”
He also connects it to econom-
icgrowth. “When a boom happens,
everything gets bigger,” he says.
“Drugs, houses, cars; something
crazy happens. If you look at people
that go into psychiatric hospitals,
there is a connection between
economic growth and that area.” He
pauses. “It makes total sense: more
money, more drugs, more craziness.
When we get this big economic
growth, everything goes to hell.”
Addiction conquers
The film tells the story of two
girls, Magnea and Stella. Magnea
is a 15-year-old suburban kid, who
meets Stella and becomes fasci-
nated by the dangerous world
in which she lives. “So we’re
watching Stella lure her into
this world of drugs and danger-
ous living,” Baldvin explains.
The story moves with them for
three years as ‘lost girls’ but then
dives into their lives 15-years later,
with the two women having gone in
totally different directions. “There
is something they need to talk about,
which took place 15 years before,
so they have to have a showdown,”
Baldvin says, smiling. “I cannot tell
you more or I will spoil the film.”
Much of the story was inspired
directly from the three girls he
interviewed. “The thing is, they
didn’t know about each other. We
interviewed them separately,”
Baldvin explains. “But we real-
ised that two of them were actu-
ally talking about each other and
the things they did to each other
are just incredible.” He pauses; it’s
clear he finds the topic at hand both
fascinating but also upsetting. “It
was a betrayal that was so huge.”
For Baldvin, this solidified
his interest in the story. “I am
fascinated by people’s capac-
ity to do wrong. But that story
summed up how addiction can
be so incredibly selfish, emotion-
less, and nasty,” he says. “In the
film, they are in love but are still
ready to do this to each other.
Addiction conquers everything.”
A new crisis
While the film explores a specific
time period in Icelandic history,
it has a special relevance to the
modern day, as Iceland is currently
going through an Opioid epidemic.
While Baldvin sees certain simi-
larities between the two situa-
tions—such as the proclivity of
Icelanders to extremity—he’s
hesitant to say that they directly
mirror each other. “There are
differences, and the film is not
about drugs, it is about who is in
this world, and their relationships
and families and the aftermath and
how you go from there into being a
normal person again,” he explains.
Moreover, Baldvin believes that
this current drug climate has a
very different context than that
of the ‘lost girls’. “The crazy thing
that is happening now is that we
are seeing kids dying that are not
addicted to drugs,” Baldvin adds.
“They are going out, drinking some
beers, and taking some Oxycontin
or Xanax or something and just
dying. It’s a new kind of drug abuse
that we have never seen before.”
Above all else, Baldvin sees addic-
tion as something that concerns
everyone regardless of the current
climate. “Drugs don’t ask about age,
nationality, colour, or where you
are from,” he says. He hopes his
story will help people understand
this dangerous world more. “It is
heavy,” he says. “But in the end, it
is just a story, it is just a film, and I
hope that it will do good things.”
The Lost Girls,
Found.
Baldvin Z’s ‘Lóf mér að falla’ delves into a
devastating segment of Icelandic history
Words: Hannah Jane Cohen Photo: Júnía Líf Maríuerla Sigurjónsdóttir
18 The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 15— 2018
The director, looking pensive
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