Mávahlátur
Who is Freya? A heroic Viking, a fairytale princess, a murderess, or the goddess of love? These are the questions that 11-year-old Agga asks herself when an elegant lady turns up one day at their house in the little fishing village of Hafnarfjördur near Reykjavik. Agga lives there with her grandmother and her aunts Dodo and Ninni. Freya is also her aunt, her grandmother's niece. During the war she married an American soldier, followed him to the US, and is now returning as a young widow. But Freya is far too beautiful and, in her mid-20s, far too young, to spend her life in mourning. She wants to make something of her life. As a working glass girl with Rita Hayworth looks, she has only one chance: she has to find a man and remarry. (...) But Freya is determined – and is closely observed by Agga, who develops in the course of two years from spy to messenger, from traitor to woman. (Festival information)
Thou shalt not kill. Can a jury devoted as fully to the message of the gospels as to aesthetic criteria award its prize to a film whose leading woman is selfish, power-hungry, and possibly a murderess? It can, if that figure is as ambivalent as Gudmundsson’s Freya. This provocative beauty is a patroness of the marginalised and the maltreated, holding a mirror that reflects, as through a glass darkly, the hypocrisy of a society whose Christianity does not extend to opening its doors for drunkards and sinners.