As part of the Krakow Film Music Festival, ‘Dreamland - Sounds of Iceland’ is being performed at the Malopolska Garden of Arts on Friday 27 September 2013. Icelandic composer, Valgeir Sigurðsson will present a live screening of selected highlights of his score to the cult documentary Draumalandið (Dreamland) (directed by Þorfinnur Guðnason and Andri Snær Magnason), together with Nadia Sirota (viola), Liam Byrne (viola da gamba), FMF Chamber Orchestra and Piotr Wajrak (conductor).
The film is a protest of artists against the exploitation of natural resources in Iceland, focusing on The Kárahnjúkar Hydropower Project and its environmental impact. Sigurðsson worked on this project in collaboration with composers Nico Muhly, Daníel Bjarnason, Ben Frost and American folk singer Sam Amidon.
‘This is a project that does not shy away from a pop music sound, but enriches it with eclectic additions, sound nuances and experiments; the music blends the organic with the synthetic and the acoustic with the digital,’
Robert Piaskowski, FMF
‘We wanted to grasp huge issues in this documentary, we travelled around the country in a helicopter, searched in new archives, observed the birds fight for their offspring. We captured footage of politicians and representatives of larger corporations during “mating season”. But how would it all sound? What leitmotifs would bring the chapters of the film together, what feeling would the music evoke? What resonates with a Caterpillar digger, a private jet and flying over a beautiful, doomed landscape? It was clear that the music needed to span vast territory […] without making the audience feel manipulated, tension needed to be created to underline, to accent, to enhance or temper the film’s effect in the appropriate places’.
Andri Snær Magnason 2009