Sunday, July 08, 2007

Film version of 'Jar City' wins award

European-films.net reports that: Baltasar Kormákur’s Icelandic noir Myrin (Jar City) won the Crystal Globe for Best Film at the 42nd Karlovy Vary Film Festival, which closed yesterday.

Myrin is the original Icelandic title of Arnaldur Indridason's Jar City, which was also published as Tainted Blood.

The review on European-films.net begins thus:

The deaths of two young girls some thirty years apart set in motion a story that will eventually encompass the story of two fathers in particular and an entire nation in general in Baltasar Kormákur’s masterful Myrin (Jar City). In his adaptation of the novel by Arnaldur Indridason, the writer-director successfully combines the elements of a police procedural, a film noir, a thriller and a modern socio-anthropological study to create a fully formed portrait of the modern Icelandic people as it has never been seen on screen. At once wholly Icelandic and completely accessible for foreign audiences, Myrin reverberates with strong echoes of what it means to be Icelandic, what it means to be part of a family and what it means to be human. After having dominated the local boxoffice last year, Myrin looks set to conquer foreign arthouses with equal ease.

Read the full review here and IMDB has a few stills from the film.

Let's hope this success in mainland Europe will bring it to cinemas in the UK and further afield.

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