SKAK bíófilm is a small Icelandic production company dedicated to making anthropological and artistic films for TV and Festival broadcast. SKAK is an old Icelandic word that means „line fishing out at sea in search of food“. The people behind SKAK can often be found fishing for stories in their little rowboat.
Even Asteroids Are Not Alone
Winner of the Royal Anthropological Institute´s (RAI) & Marsh Short Film Prize for ‘the most outstanding short film on social, cultural and biological anthropology or archaeology’ in 2019.
‘Best Digital Film Award’ at Gagarin.Doc International Student Film Festival 2020
Like roaming asteroids, we move through space: never alone, forming deep bonds along the way. Hundreds of thousands of online gamers mine, trade and fight their way through computer-generated galaxies far, far away from the world as we know it. In the vast and hostile world of New Eden, no one can really be trusted. How can one make friends in the depths of space? Weaving together the experiences of fourteen Eve Online players, we reveal an intimate story about the ability of online games to forge community and bridge the space between us.
Screenings, wins and nominations:
- Ethnocineca, International Documentary Film Festival, Vienna, Austria – May 4th -10th 2018. (Nominated for the ESSA student awards)
- Skjaldborg, Icelandic Documentary Film Festival, Patreksfjörður, Iceland – May 18th-21st 2018.
- NAFA, Nordic Anthropological Film Association, Cluj-Napoca, Romania – Sept 11th-15th 2018.
- Berlin Sci-Fi Filmfest, Berlin, Germany – Nov 16th-17th 2018.
- Etnoff, Festival of Ethnographic Student Movies in Skopje, Macedonia – Dec 15th 2018
- Transmediale, Berlin, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Germany – Jan 31st – Feb 3rd 2019
- Days of Ethnographic Film, Ljubljana, Slovenia – March 6th-9th 2019
- Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI) Film Festival, Bristol, U.K. – 27th-30th mars 2019 (Winner of the Royal Anthropological Institute´s (RAI) & Marsh Short Film Prize for ‘the most outstanding short film on social, cultural and biological anthropology or archaeology’ )
- Cinema Perpetuum Mobile Festival, Minsk, Belarus – March 30th – April 3rd 2019
- Data Stories, Volos, Greece – May 31st – June 2nd
- G-Fleet 2019, Berlin, Germany – Sept 13th-14th 2019
- LA CITTÀ-Antropologia applicata ai territorian, Ferrara, Italy – Dec 13th-15th 2019
- RAI@USC 2020 Festival, Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI) and Center for Visual Anthropology at the University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles, U.S. – March 5th-7th 2020
- EVE Fanfest, Reykjavík, Iceland – April 2nd-4th 2020 (cancelled/postponed due to Covid 19)
- Tsiolkovsky Space Fest, Kaluga, Russia – April 9th 2020 (cancelled/postponed due to Covid 19)
- Ethnografilm, Paris, France – April 21st-25th 2020 (postponed due to Covid 19)
- Besides the Screen conference and festival, Vitória, Brazil – April-May 2020 (Moved online and postponed to August due to Covid 19)
- Digital Lives, an online programme of RAI Film Fest shorts organised in collaboration with Bertha DocHouse – April 10th 2020.
- Milan Machinima Festival, Online – August 21st-Sept 3rd 2020.
- Vizantrop Festival, Belgrade, Serbia – September 16th-20th 2020.
- Northern Wave International Film Festival, Grundarfjörður, Iceland – October 23rd-25th 2020. (postponed due to Covid 19)
- Gagarin.Doc International Student Film Festival, Saratov, Russia – October-November 2020 (the Best Digital Film Award)
Distribution: The RAI
Half Elf
Winner of ‘the Grand Jury Prize’ at Skjaldborg, Icelandic Documentary Film Festival 2020
A lighthouse keeper prepares for his earthly funeral while trying to reconnect to the elf within. Hulda and Trausti have shared a roof on Icelandic shores for over seventy years. Her love of books is matched by his love of stones. When he bursts out singing, she begs him to stop screaming. When he tells her he wants to change his name to “Elf”, she warns that his family will abandon him. Now, as Trausti’s hundredth birthday approaches and he senses the hand of death upon him he is on a quest to find the coffin that can carry this elf back to the mysteries beyond…. Meanwhile, Hulda retreats into a world of poetry with the help of an electric magnifying glass. Half Elf is a modern Icelandic fairy- tale where life is celebrated – despite everything, despite ourselves and despite the reality that awaits all of us in the end.
Screenings, wins and nominations:
- Nomination for the “Excellence in Visual Anthropology Awards” at Ethnocineca, International Documentary Film Festival, Vienna, Austria – May 7th – May 13th 2020 (Cancelled due to Covid 19)
- Nomination for the “New Voices in documentary cinema” competition at ASTRA FILM, Sibiu International Film Festival, Sibiu, Romania – 4th – 13th September 2020 and 15th-25th October 2020
- Nomination for the “Best New Nordic Voice” at Nordisk Panorama, Malmö, Sweden – 17th – 27th September 2020
- Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Skjaldborg, Icelandic Documentary Film Festival, Reykjavík, Iceland – September 18th – 20th 2020.
- Official Selection for the Green Years program, Docslisboa, Lisbon, Portugal – Oct 22nd – Nov 3rd 2020
- Competition in the “Films of the North” program, Tromsö International Film Festival, TIFF, Tromsö, Norway – Jan 18th – 24th 2021
- Competes for the Rai Film Prize & The Basil Wright Prize in the Main Competition of RAI Film Festival, of the Royal Anthropological Institute in the U.K. – March 16th – 28th 2021
- Nominated as best documentary for The Icelandic Film & Television Academy Award, the EDDA Awards. – 2021
- Official Selection for the Riga Pasaules Film Festival, Riga, Latvia. – June 3rd – June 6th 2021
- A special Commendation of the Ageing and Visual Anthropology Award (AVA 2021 Award). – Dec 2021
- Winner of the Manfred Krüger Awards for Excellent Camera Work, at the 16th biannual German International Ethnographic Film Festival, Göttingen, Germany – May 25th – May 30th 2022
- The 17th Biennal Conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists, EASA, Belfast, Northern Ireland – July 2022
- Equal Film Fest, Costa Rica – July 2022
- NAFA, Nordic Anthropological Film Association, Romania – September 2022
- ETNOFF, 8th International Festival For Ethnographic Films, Skopje, Macedonia – September 2022
- Winner of the Best Student Film Award at the 31st International Festival of Ethnological Film, Belgrade, Serbia – October 3rd – October 6th 2022
Distribution: Feelsales
Hlín Ólafsdóttir
Hlín Ólafsdóttir is a visual artist and producer with background in creative writing. She graduated with Bachelor degrees in Creative Writing (2012) and Japanese language and culture (2013) from the University of Iceland and is currently enrolled at the sculpture department of the Weißensee Academy of Art, Berlin. Hlín has participated in numerous arts exhibitions home and abroad, both as artist and curator, most recently in „Glücklich unterwegs … und frei“ in Ganzer/Wusterhausen, Germany, and SOUP OPERA at MEME in Athens Greece. She has done writing, music teaching and worked in editing and publishing amongst other things. Hlín is the co-founder of SKAK bíófilm and producer of Half Elf (coming 2020) and Even Asteroids Are Not Alone (2018). She did the original score for Half Elf.
hlin@skakbiofilm.com
Jón Bjarki Magnússon
Jón Bjarki Magnússon is a visual anthropologist and documentary filmmaker with a background in journalism. He studied creative writing at the University of Iceland and received his MA in Visual and Media Anthropology from Freie Universität, Berlin, in 2018. His award-winning projects include journalism on the conditions of refugees and asylum-seekers in Iceland, and ethnographic films exploring themes such as the later life course, biomedical categorizations, death, technology, and friendship in cyberspace. A recipient of the German International Ethnographic Film Festival’s Manfred Krüger Awards for ‘Excellent Camera Work’ and the Royal Anthropological Institute’s Short Film Prize for ‘the most outstanding short film on social, cultural and biological anthropology or archaeology’, Magnússon is currently an ADVANCE CRT researcher at Maynooth University, where he is working on a multimodal ethnographic Ph.D. research situated near the intersection of anthropology and technology, more precisely on the social connections of older adults in online virtual worlds.
jonbjarki@skakbiofilm.com
