HULDA RÓS GUÐNADÓTTIR

KEEP FROZEN. 

SCREENING AT VISIONS DU RÉEL IN NYON, SWITZERLAND

On a cold night a loaded factory trawler enters Reykjavik harbour. On board there are 20,000 boxes of frozen fish, each weighing 25kg. The temperature in the compartment is -35°C and the workers have 48 hours to empty the ship before it goes back to sea.

We spoke to the films director, Hulda Ros Gudnadottir.

Why did you want to make a documentary about harbour workers?

I noticed that in the western world that manual labour is invisible and hidden from sight of the middle class sand mainstream media. People generally don’t notice that manual labour is happening all around them. It was very interesting to me when I was telling my twenty-year-old babysitter that I wanted to make this film and she responded to me by asking if workers still existed. It really seems that people don´t notice that everything around them has been moved from one place to the other by someone. I think the general thought is that the biggest revolution in the last thirty years is the internet but as artist, filmmaker and essayist Allan Sekula has expressed: the arrival of containers really revolutionised the way we live and made today´s consumer society possible. It’s not just like most products fly around in airplanes around the world. Mostly they are moved by ships and there has never been a point in history were more products have been moved around the world. All those products need to be unloaded and transported all around.

... to be continued

Stundin 4. febrúar 2016 / Stundin newspaper Iceland 4th of February 2016

Þegar hjól sirkussins fara að snúast á ný (When the wheels of the circus start turning again) ****1/2, art review by Thora Thorisdóttir.
Morgunblaðið, February 2011.