"This is the first time I have had the nerve to pursue my own vision completely. Trust my gut. And I think that makes for a much better film," the 31-year-old Icelander Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson says.
"It's a very personal story," Guðmundsson says. He, too, grew up in a small fishing village in Iceland. "Life there could be beautiful and tough at once. I had a good friend, just a few years older than me, who I thought of as a brother and who later took ..."
Read the full interview in FILM Digital Cannes Issue 2013
Whale Valley
Set on an isolated farm in Iceland, the film follows a seven-year-old boy who accidentally interrupts his older brother's suicide attempt. His brother makes him promise not to tell their parents, and the film examines the relationship between the two brothers in the aftermath using images of rugged scenery to express the young boys' inner turmoil and feelings of isolation.
