Director's Note

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 with the smaller villages all around the Icelandic coast and immensely disturbed the infrastructure of the Icelandic society. One by one the fishing villages around the coast have been losing quotas to the bigger companies in the capital and the inhabitant have been flocking away from those places, leaving their worthless houses and half-empty fishing plants. Most of the people that have stayed behind are the 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 a quite complicated system and very contradictory to say the least. When the system was legalized, the “quota rights” were basically given out to certain number of people and fishing industries according to the recent “track record” at sea; i.e. according to how active they had been in terms of quantity of fish pulled out of the sea for a certain period of the time prior to the execution of this legislation.

This crisis is basically the background of the film, where it’s 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 village, basically run by one man, Thordur, the owner of the busy fishing plant. The semi-retired, tyrannical, hard working Thordur has been “king” in the village (and in his family too) for many decades as the owner of the fishing plant, but now he is fighting against his elder son (now so-called manager of the fishing plant) who would like his father to submit to the new economical and technical realities.

The film tells the conflict between numbers of a family where a tyrant father, who has suppressed all the members for such a long time, has to face a show-down when he has gathered the whole family together for a family feast.

THE SEA was shot on location in Neskaupstadur, one of those places where the traces of “the golden days” have been fading over the last 10 years or so. In the magnificent fjord which is surrounded by the beautiful mountains, the small houses and run-down factories form a great contrast that I wanted to use specifically in telling this story.

Baltasar Kormakur

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