“The Wind Blew On”

 The Wind Blew On English title

 

A 2014 Icelandic film production [Duo Productions, Incoherence Cinema (Reykjavík)]

Producers: David Cronenberg, Colin McSwiggen, Katrín Ólafsdóttir, Katie Nicoll

Director: Katrín Ólafsdóttir

Story: Katrín Ólafsdóttir

Screenplay: Katrín Ólafsdóttir

Cinematography: Mauro Herce, Arnar Thor Thorisson [color]

Music:

Running time: 90 minute

 

Story: A young boy searches for a forest on a post-apocalyptic desert planet.

 

Cast:

Geraldine Chaplin, Elina Löwensohn, Ángela Molina, Mattthew Barney, Floki Molina, Ivan Babinchak, David Cronenberg, Tereza Hofová, Oliver Laxe Teodor, Úlfur Muñoz Katrínarson

Ólafsdóttir said the film is “a post-apocalyptic western with elements of a musical.” The film has shot “from 2011 following the boy as he is growing up.” She added that she doesn’t work from traditional scripts and instead works closely with the actors to collaborate.

"Perhaps I'm already dead," says the little boy at one point in Katrin Ólafsdóttir's The Wind Blew On, to himself or someone else, but these words are spoken in a world where no one can confirm this for him either way. He is on a journey, alone and with others, things having strayed from their course without anyone knowing why.

The unsettling landscapes he makes his way through, real and imaginary; the ruins he plays among and the enigmatic figures he encounters there, threatening and weleoming in turn, who teach him how to become who he is; the half remembered fragments of the past that somehow return to him: The Wind Blew On shows us scenes of a life lived after the end of the world has taken place, and the search for an escape from this fate.

Shot on location in Iceland and Spain, specifically in Almeria, the home of the Spaghetti Western, this otherworldly sci-fi is as much post-apocalyptic as it is mystical.