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Baltasar Kormákur - Biography

Actor / Director / Producer / Writer
Born: February 27, 1966

Baltasar Kormákur was born in Reykjavik, Iceland in 1966. He graduated as an actor from Iceland’s National Academy of Fine Arts in 1990 and was signed on by the National Theatre of Iceland right after his graduation where he worked as one of the leading young performing artists until 1997. The last two years of his assignment he also directed some ambitious productions after having produced and directed immensely popular, independent stage productions alongside his work at the theatre.

Baltasar wrote the screenplay, directed, acted in and produced the film 101 Reykjavik in the year 2000, and after the international success of the film, Baltasar started Blueeyes Productions. Since then his main focus has been on film as writer/director/producer. His films 101 Reykjavik (2000), The Sea (2002), A Little Trip to Heaven (2005) and Jar City (2006) have won many international awards. His latest film, White Night Wedding (2008) was released in Iceland on January 18, 2008 and was an instant hit. Celluloid-Dreams picked it up for world sales and launched the film in Toronto in September 2008. White Night Wedding is Iceland´s entry for the Oscar nomination 2009, for foreign language film. - Currently he is directing Inhale, a US feature film, starring Dermot Mulroney, Diane Kruger, Sam Shepard, Rosanna Arquette, Vincent Perez and Jordi Mollá. The film is a co-production between the Los Angeles based 26 Films and Blueeyes Productions.

Baltasar was named along with directors such as Christopher Nolan and Alejandro G. Inárritu as “one of the 10 most exciting new talents” in Variety L.A. 2001 January issue.

Jar City (Mýrin) opened in Iceland on October 20, 2006 and received fantastic reviews and instantly became a box office hit. It ended up being the biggest film of the year 2006 in Iceland and the best box office film ever. Jar City was selected into competition at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival 2007 and won the main prize, The Crystal Globe. Also selected by Telluride and Toronto Film Festival 2007, Pusan, London Film Festival along with over 50 other festivals and has received great reviews. IFC acquired the US distribution rights in Toronto and so did Memento Films for France and The Works in the UK. Jar City has been circulating in appx 50-60 festivals from October 2007 and was tightly booked for festivals well into the year 2008.

Still having a soft spot for the theatre, Baltasar has directed three box office hits for the National Theatre in recent years. His production Almost There, based on a novel by Hallgrimur Helgason (101 Reykjavik) was a great success. Baltasar and the actors received numerous awards at the GRIMAN Awards 2004 (Theatre Awards) and ran for two full years.
In March 2006, the National Theatre launched Baltasar´s Peer Gynt, a project that became an instant success with the Icelandic audiences and won most of the prizes at the GRIMAN Awards 2006. The performance was selected by the Ibsen Festival of Oslo in August 2006, where it received amazing reviews and the Barbican in London picked up Peer Gynt as well and ran the production in March 2007. At the same time Barbican´s Film Division programmed some of Baltasar´s feature films.

With White Night Wedding, inspired by the characters of Anton Checkhov’s Ivanov, but still set in contemporary Iceland, Baltasar also directed the same ensemble cast in his production of the play for Iceland’s National Theatre. The play premiered on December 26, 2007. His idea was initially to run both the play and the film at the same time as a double event. This worked brilliantly. The Icelandic audience as well as the critics have highly appreciated both the play and the film.

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