The Glitterstorm

Ragnar Bjarnasson career spans 60 years. Now at 75 he is ready to examine his career and allow us access to the idol Ragnar Bjarnason who is much loved by all ages. The camera follows him during a grand performance in honor of his seventy fifth birthday and gives us a glimpse of the pendulous chances of his life and career as a singer and performer.

Trans man Stafford candidly tells the story of a memorable encounter he had at a sex club.

When 90% of Iceland’s women walked off the job and out of their homes one morning in 1975, they brought their country to its knees and catapulted Iceland to the forefront of today's global fight for gender equality. Unexpectedly funny, laced with evocative animation and powerfully told by the women who lived it – this is the true story of 12 hours that launched a revolution.

The documentary by Mari Soppela focuses on glass ceilings, a metaphor for the invisible borders between men and women in work life. Talk about glass ceilings is usually associated with women’s opportunities to advance to well paid managerial positions, but the documentary connects itself more broadly to the structural problems of work life from women’s perspective. Glass ceilings are long trials about equal pay, having to continually prove one’s skills, and 85-cent euros. The topic cannot be handled without intersectional crossings: what are invisible glass ceilings for some, are solid concrete for others.

Marc Huestis edits interviews with 15 men, including himself, around a set of topics starting with "what is sex?" The men are gay, living in or near San Francisco. They talk about their first sexual experiences, the gay scene in San Francisco in the late 1970s, the pall cast by AIDS, the safe-sex movement, getting into serious relationships, the illness and death of partners, pornography, S/M and pain, race and stereotypes, personal fantasies, and bliss. Huestis has a thesis, that sex is going to be with us, so how best do we embrace it? His 15 subjects, archival footage, clips from porn films, and close-up looks at men loving men flesh out various answers.

Anxious to use artificial life to improve the world, Rosetta Stone, a bio-geneticist, creates a Recipe for Cyborgs and uses her own DNA in order to breed three Self Replicating Automatons, part human, part computer named Ruby, Olive and Marine.

Nine Icelandic gay teens tell us about their lives in their frozen corner of the world. Feeling excluded, experimenting with drugs and sex, finding others like themselves, self hatred, thoughts of suicide, coming out to parents. These honest interviews show us that no matter where they are in the world many aspects of being gay are universal.

The opening of The Vasulka Effect couldn’t be more apt: Steina Vasulka addresses her husband Woody through various TV screens. He does the same and replies. A perfect image of the relationship between the free-spirited, groundbreaking pioneers of video art. After meeting in Prague in the early 1960s, they relocated from Czechoslovakia to New York, where they later founded The Kitchen, their legendary art and performance gallery.

An older couple, Sigga and Runni, reveal funeral photos of their long-dead son who died tragically young. After thirty years, the photos still elicit painful differences between a grieving mother and her stoic husband; Rúna a housewife living in the harsh and isolated west fjords keeps funeral photos of a terrible family tragedy. For Rúna, they mark a profound event which forever changed her and which belong side by side with photos of weddings, confirmations and baptisms; Erlendur and his stepdaughter Úlfhildur, after nursing his wife through a long battle with cancer, use photography to record her on her deathbed, in peace at last. And Sigrún, morbidly fascinated with funerals and wakes, compulsively videotapes acquaintances' family funerals as a bulwark against her own fear of death. When she experiences death first hand however, her attitudes change.

An oppressed office worker is whisked away to a dynamic club scene by a strapping bike messenger.

Film for an exhibit on Mongolia in San Francisco.

Nanna is a single mother in Reykjavík who lives with her twenty something son Gudni Geir. She is not in awe of any of his various girlfriends and seems determined to ruin all his relationships. When Gudni comes out to her, their relationship changes drastically.

Canvas and Curtains is a documentary about the icelandic artist and scenographer, Steinthor Sigurdsson. This biography narrates Steinthors story from his childhood years in his native town Stykkisholmur, until present time. Steinthor recently celebrated his 80th birthday and has in the past few years continued his work as exhibition planner and designer. In this film we follow his present time work, designing the Icelandic Seal Center in Hvammstangi and the Volcano Museum in Stykkisholmur. Steinthor goes to visit an old friend in Stockholm. The trip brings back memories from their school years at Stockholms art academy and in Spain in the fifties.

When politics and the power structure fail to embrace equal rights in the 1980s, women take matter into their own hands and permanently change how things are done, and the face of Icelandic society as a whole.

The Icelandic national women's football team has the chance to qualify for the European Championship Finals for the first time in history. To make the dream come true the team has to win all their upcoming matches - against much bigger nations.

Gays and lesbians lived in silence and fear in Iceland for the better part of the 20th century. Local songwriter and actor Hordur Torfason was the first to come out publicly in an interview in 1975 which caused an uproar in Iceland. This interview marks the beginning of the struggle for civil rights for gays and lesbians. People Like That – first part chronicles this struggle, stories of people who took on the current system of oppression in the hope of creating a fair society in which they could flourish.