Reykjavík Grapevine - mar 2020, Qupperneq 28

The Outsiders:
Ra!nar Bra!ason
Tackles
Xenophobia
In ‘Gullre!n’ (The Garden),
Iceland confronts itself
Words: Andie Sophia Fontaine Photo: Art Bicnick
Ragnar Bragason’s name will be
familiar to many Icelanders, and to
a wider international audience as
well. While his first feature film,
‘Fiasco’ (Fíaskó), broke ground in
2000, he is perhaps most lauded
for his television trilogy “Night
Shift” (Næturvaktin), “Day Shift”
(Dagvaktin) and “Prison Shift”
(Fangavaktin), all featuring Jón
Gnarr’s iconic character Georg
Bjarnfre!arson.
His latest work, ‘The Garden’
(Gullregn), is a feature film based
on a play of the same play that he
wrote. Like the Shift series, it em-
ploys dark comedy, but it also ad-
dresses particularly delicate sub-
ject matter: xenophobia.
The view from the
La-Z-Boy
In ‘The Garden’, the main charac-
ter, Indíana Jónsdóttir, lives her
life by gaming the social welfare
system. At the same time, the
neighbourhood where her coun-
cil estate is located houses a lot of
immigrants—whom she believes
unfairly game the system and are
taking over the country.
“Everything revolves around
that La-Z-Boy chair that Indíana
has, controlling her kingdom,”
Ragnar explains. “Indíana is afraid
of everything, she's afraid of life,
she's afraid of the world outside.
She controls her immediate sur-
roundings, the people close to her,
in a very calculated manner, but
she has no control of the outside
world. And that's the story—when
this outside world comes in."
The outside world comes in the
form of Daniella, a Polish woman
who is the new girlfriend of Indía-
na’s son Orri. Daniella’s perspec-
tive sheds light on the toxic envi-
ronment that Indíana has created.
When you live in an unhealthy
environment, you're so co-depen-
dent that you don't see it or re-
alise it,” Ragnar tells us. “You're
enmeshed in it. So I decided when
writing that I needed an outsider
to come in, and that person needs
to be someone who is not rooted
in the Icelandic way of thinking. A
guest who would see things clear-
ly. So she's the only kind of healthy
person in the story."
All too human
"Most of my work tends to tell sto-
ries about people on the outskirts
of society,” Ragnar says. “Not nec-
essarily outsiders, but people on
the fringes, and very often wom-
en, because personally I find their
stories are often more interesting.
Their emotional life is more de-
tailed, and they have more chal-
lenges to face. The theme, for me,
is the repercussions of violence,
the sins of our fathers and moth-
ers. How we still live with that gen-
eration after generation. How it is
up to us to break that chain."
With ‘The Garden’, Ragnar
seeks to raise uncomfortable ques-
tions about Iceland’s self-image.
"Icelanders tend to see our-
selves as a nation in a very ro-
mantic light,” he says. “We have
this image of being an almost
perfect country. Which for me is
far from the truth. Every society
has problems. Xenophobia is very
deep-rooted here. Even though
we don't have neo-Nazis march-
ing the streets in large groups, but
that's just because we're so few.
There are as many neo-Nazis per
capita in Iceland as there are any-
where else. We need to tell stories
about social injustice, but I'm not
preaching. Often my main charac-
ters are very bad people, or people
that appear bad in the beginning,
but little by little we realise that
there's always a root to everything.
Nobody is an island.”
'Gullregn' can be seen at Smárabíó
and Laugarásbíó.
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