Once upon a time, a small band of vikings found an island of ice and fire.
It was a harsh but beautiful place and for a thousand years they survived off the fish
and the sea and the sheep and the meadows.
Dirt poor but wildly creative.
With very few natural resources, Iceland owes much of its prosperity and growth to its banking sector,
which has now collapsed and the nation itself is facing bankruptcy.
Interest on the mortgage for our house is risen by 12%.
That's a thousand euros a month.
It's obvious that the bankers in London are trying to put you and also in the Netherlands,
are trying to put your population into debt slavery.
A few days ago you released a call to the people of the world to support Iceland against the financial blackmail
of the British and the Dutch government and the IMF.
After this collapse and stuff, there was a lot uncovered, like lots of corruption in politics and business life.
People are just mad at how unfair things can be, like people who have worked hard their whole lives
and saved money and tried to buy a house and now they are bankrupt and they're getting evicted
but then big companies are getting their debts completely written off.
That's just such a basic injustice.
The financial sphere, the weapon of choice is accounting.
There are many other spheres and they use different tactics.
By the way, just having come back from Iceland, this is what the big three banks out there did
that became ten times the GDP of Iceland and destroyed the entire national economy.
When the crisis hit the business school, like the school for business was overcrowded
the banks were just hiring kids who only finished two years just giving them a bigger.
So all the young kids looked up to bankers and like suited assholes
and that were their heroes in a way, so that has changed.
Why put it to a referendum and not let this agreement go ahead as initially planned with your government?
They knew they were getting a high rate of return.
When you get a high rate of return there's a risk attached.
They didn't get paid but they thought they were getting paid tough luck.
Because there was a lot of pressure put on young people to make money.
I think it's different now. People are choosing what they really love.
They're like studying arts more and doing things that they want to do, not just to make some money.
You know I can choose between sitting in my kitchen, dreaming about doing anything and not doing anything and not earning anything.
Or I can do the things that I really like, that I love to do in my life and with my life and earn nothing.
You can feel it in the atmosphere. There's like a lot of things happening.
I think it's much more creativeness in the air.
We're expecting some seven or eight future this year and that's incredible.
The part that I think is so fun about making films is a roller coaster.
Everything's going great and then it's a panic but then everybody cries and then everybody's happy in the end.
Even though the name Knowlty is close to Scientology, we're thinking of all kinds of cults and religious groups.
The movie is kind of like just trying to sum up all this world that I've been trying to create over the last few years.
You're like stuck in a mountain for a week with no phone connection and the next petrol station was maybe an hour away.
Cars got out of gas in the middle of the night.
Doing a fashion film I think and having it be a good film is really difficult if you want to have it too much fashion.
Now where are some of these bankers now? Aren't they actually hiding in London?
They actually are and why haven't their assets been frozen yet?
Nobody here in Iceland understands it.
But we have actually offered the Brits and the Dutch to do everything we could to help them track down the money that had been stolen by these people and track them down.
But they'd rather just go into the pockets of Atlantic taxpayers and get the money from there.
Their houses have been splattered with red paint throughout the whole year.
Every week or a month their houses are splattered with paint here in Iceland.
That's right the bankers' houses are splattered with red paint.
Things have gradually gone a little bit weird.
You would try to get people for sessions or get people to do things and it was almost too easy to not do things.
On Airwaves it's just that extra that everyone puts into it. It's just like the result of the year for all the Icelandic bands.
Everybody is like monthly for Airwaves. Every band is like...
Making costumes.
Yeah, like the day where Christmas is coming we have to make costumes and make a solid programme.
It's like Christmas. Everybody dress up. Everybody is suited for the festivities.
They want to have a blast. They want to give it the best show ever.
It's not like how festival people are just playing their music. They're doing extra to it.
Kill it in a year. It's like a thick intimacy that people just squeeze it out and you just get in here.
Yesterday was my best show ever I think. I had so much fun. I just really connected with everything that was going on.
There's a good vibe in Icelandic music. Very do-it-yourself kind of atmosphere.
There are bands that are really trying to do good music and it's the only reason for it is to make the good music.
It's not to get into a party or get lots of money or girls or whatever.
There used to be like no classes in Iceland. Maybe 20 years ago just everyone had approximately the same.
Even if they were presidents of the biggest company or teacher or whatever. That was quite healthy.
I get all excited love. I think I need to hear some more.
I think of you all the time. I still need to hear some more.
Making up my mind right now. Why are you doing that part?
Coal aluminum that sent these people into Iceland to convince them to take out a huge loan.
Build a gigantic hydroelectric plant just for alcohol. 600 megawatts.
The whole country but prior to that was only using 300 megawatts and it would destroy a huge fragile environment
and all the environmental laws were waived.
And when I heard this I said well Iceland will probably be the first developed country to go bankrupt.
Here Iceland had been hit in exactly the same way that I used to hit countries in the third world.
You have a resource that corporations covet. In the case of Iceland it was cheap electricity.
In the case of many countries it was oil. You range a huge loan to that country.
And you strike a really good deal for multinational corporations.
And then in the end the country can't pay off its loan like Iceland can't now.
So you've got them. They're part of the empire. You've got them.
Will you be my everything?
I'm dreaming. I'm dreaming of you.
I'm dreaming. I'm dreaming of you.
This contract would give magma energy 65 years of unrestricted access to this geothermal energy.
But actually geothermal energy isn't renewable. It can actually be used up in 50 years if it's not harnessed correctly.
So that's a problem.
If we lose our nature and our sources, what is left here?
I think it's very important. It's such a huge important part of our identity.
Of ourselves. Of what we are, what we stand for, where we come from.
We have to get our economic back and make money, but we don't have to destroy the nature to do it.
It's good that people are realising what happened on going, like bullshit in our country.
It's a big battle anyway in Iceland. I don't know how it's going to end.
It's like people are desperate, they need a solution and a simple solution is like a factory.
How is Oskar? It's being sold for nothing. It's like we're giving away our natural resources for free essentially.
There are parallels to the way that this deal is going and problematic deals before Iceland's economic crash.
It's this Rosbidi and Magma Energy, Sweden, which is actually just this PO box company. Basically they're not actually able to finance the acquisition.
They've only paid, I think, 3.6 billion of 11.5 billion in cash and the rest is going to be loans.
Divide and conquer is the motto, and as long as people continue to see themselves as separate from everything else, they lend themselves to being completely enslaved.
The men behind the curtain know this, and they also know that if people ever realise the truth of their relationship to nature and the truth of their personal power,
the entire manufactured zeitgeist they prey upon will collapse like a house of cards.
This came from Iceland just to publicise the case of Rachel Ignain, who is facing a month to 16 years in jail for supposedly threatening the independence of the Icelandic parliament.
This action was actually really, really important in stepping up the so-called factory or kitchen utensil revolt, which 40 days later deposed this conservative and social democrat government.
It's kind of more interesting to be in Iceland now than it was. It's more gangster to be in Iceland. We're like the Sicily of North Europe now.
Is this what we want? Is democracy the best? Why do we think so? We need to just think about things a little more.
People are really angry, but I don't know now who they're supposed to be angry at.
It's a society where everything that was right is wrong now. Every kind of moral shifted.
Do we want left-wing right-wing? Do we really need that? Do we need those parties battling against it? Can we do it in another way? Is there another possible way to do it?
It's really honest and it's just like giving a lot of love.
He's like one of the funniest men I could ever meet.
Anyone could just step up with their own sense of humour and say, well, that's just me, that's how I am, and expect people to understand it.
Basically it's just a party of creative people, like a known comedian here in Anarkista, and he's now the mayor of Reykjavik.
He's a responsible politician, but he uses another vocabulary.
It's sometimes good to kind of bathe yourself in melancholy. It's a happy feeling.
I've been doing a lot of see-through stuff recently, very impractical.
And Cloney Tark.
I've been doing a lot of see-through stuff recently, very impractical.
I've been doing a lot of see-through stuff lately.
I've been doing a lot of see-through stuff lately.
I've been doing a lot of see-through stuff lately.
