Border patrol: Filmmaking on the margins in Icelandic director Ísold Uggadóttir’s And Breathe Normally

Park City, Utah — The first act of Icelandic writer/director Ísold Uggadóttir’s And Breathe Normally, for which Uggadóttir won the World Cinema Dramatic Directing Award at this year's Sundance Film Festival, offers an unlikely mirror image: a female border patrol agent at Iceland’s Keflavik airport is faced with a woman from Guinea Bissau seeking to pass through on a false passport. Although separated by a glass barrier and other cosmetic distinctions in their first meeting, by the end these women share an experience of life at the margins of gender, sexuality, and class. 

For first-time feature director Uggadóttir, this moment rhymes with a moment in her filmmaking past in which she was on the other side of that glass. For her first short film, she smuggled super-16mm film into Iceland to avoid import taxes that she could not afford to pay in order to get the production started. That film, Family Reunion, played at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival and told a similar story about transience, sexuality and family. And like her refugee protagonist in And Breathe Normally, Uggadóttir would leave Sundance that year without a clear sense of when she would return.

 In fact Uggadóttir's path back to Sundance might strike some as a reversal of the usual order. After Family Reunion made the rounds of the festival circuit, Uggadóttir then went to film school, pursuing an MFA at Columbia University where she found her tribe, including fellow director Christina Choe, whose most recent film, Nancy, also competed at Sundance this year in the U.S. Dramatic category. For an independent director like Uggadóttir whose short films have been invited to over 120 international festivals, film festivals like Sundance offer a community not found during the filmmaking process. At festivals, directors share war stories and, for Uggadóttir, “it’s nice to feel you’re not alone in this somewhat lonely profession.”

With the focus on female filmmakers at Sundance this year and with nearly 40 percent of this year’s festival slate directed by women, Uggadóttir finds herself in rare company and with a spotlight on her work that did not exist during her first Sundance go-round. With that first film, “I never thought about being a female filmmaker. I just made my film. I never really thought about my gender.”

Yet Uggadóttir, who won Columbia’s Adrienne Shelly Award for Best Female Director in 2011, drew inspiration from fellow female director Andrea Arnold’s work, including her Academy Award-winning short Wasp (2003) and celebrated feature Fish Tank, which was shot entirely on location and in chronological order.

“She’s a bit of an idol for me,” Uggadóttir admits. And it’s not surprising that Arnold is an influence. And Breathe Normally shares a naturalist sensibility with its spare performances and lack of glamour for its two female protagonists. And unlike other depictions of Iceland, including Land Ho!, which premiered at Sundance in 2014, And Breathe Normally refuses postcard images of the Nordic island nation in favor of presenting a harsh and forbidding landscape where those without the natural privileges of class, gender and sexuality find no quarter except with each other.

“There’s something about ruggedness I’m drawn to,” Uggadóttir states. In both Family Reunion and And Breathe Normally her aim was to defy expectations and “not to overuse Icelandic nature” as a source of beauty. Instead the goal was to present the contemporary refugee problem, which has touched Iceland's small nation of 300,000 as much as continental Europe and the United States, not just “from the eyes of the refugee,” but also to allow viewers “to see from one who is on the other side.”

And Breathe Normally immediately furnishes the spectator with a sense of the entrapment felt by single mother Lara (Kristín Thóra Haraldsdóttir) who doesn’t even have enough money to pay the fees to adopt a cat at the local shelter for her young son, Eldar (Patrik Nökkvi Pétursson). In order to keep her tenuous grip on stability, Lara is focused on successfully completing her training as a border agent. But when she is confronted with Adja (Babetida Sadjo), a refugee from Guinea Bissau on her way to Canada, Lara must make the choice whether to do her job and reinforce the system or turn a blind eye and allow the other woman a chance at a new life. This conflict fuels the film, which plays as a female-driven take on the refugee issue at the heart of Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki’s new film, The Other Side of Hope, which will open the Eckerd College spring International Cinema series on Feb. 9.

Until And Breathe Normally reaches audiences beyond Sundance though, Uggadóttir urges audiences to seek out films like hers that are often considered on the margins due to their international profiles: “Don't be afraid of foreign films…. It’s healthy to [stray] from your home country and background.”

This article appears in Jan 25 – Feb 1, 2018.