and proudHeather Millard is British and proud but has been based in Iceland for 12 years now, heading up international production and financing at Compass Films, the company she founded in 2012 and runs alongside Thordur Jonsson. She directs BDE towards her upcoming Forum project Band.
The outfit’s first credit was South African romantic psychological thriller Of Good Report which premiered at the 2013 Toronto Film Festival. Since then, though, Compass has focused largely on documentary.
“I’ve always had a passion for documentaries. Part of my background in the UK was working on documentaries and it was documentary which brought me to Iceland, in the first place,” Millard (who also works with South African-owned international film company Spier Films) explains. Although Compass has swung toward other forms in recent years, developing fiction features and animated series, documentaries remain the bedrock of the business.
“I’ve always got space for documentaries. They are very important to me,” the producer underlines. “I feel very passionate and dedicated toward documentaries and I won’t stop producing them.”
One of the company’s latest docs is Band by Álfrún Örnólfsdóttir which is in the Works-in-Progress section of CPH: Forum this week. The film is billed as “the make-or-break story of an Icelandic female band that probably won’t make it, and isn’t really a band.” The co-producer is Andreas Kask for Nafta Film (Estonia).
Örnólfsdóttir is a trained actress and a talented writer but Band is her first real foray into directing. “I was introduced to Álfrún by other industry professionals and from the very first meeting, I was really impressed by her pitch and her vision for the film,” Millard says of her director. “I am very impressed by her creativity and she has a strong visual style.”
The band in question exists on the border between performance art and rock/pop. Whether or not the musicians are talented, Millard describes them as “very entertaining.”
Reflecting the band’s multi-disciplinary approach, the doc itself is a “hybrid” creation which includes certain re-enactments, albeit of events that actually happened.
The film is “nearing the finish line.” A new rough cut will be ready the week after CPH:DOX. The aim now is to get festival programmers interested in the doc which should be ready for the early autumn festivals.
Yes, Millard acknowledges, Iceland is very different from the UK when it comes to funding for documentary. Local filmmakers are heavily reliant on support from The Icelandic Film Centre. “The broadcasters pay far less for the licence fee than they do in the UK but our national funding body is very supportive of documentaries,” she says. With less local money available for production than in other Nordic countries, Icelandic producers also often look to co-produce and to access support from Creative Europe, Eurimages or the Oslo-based Nordisk Film and TV Fund.
The Icelandic Film Centre has championed Band from the outset, giving it a production grant of close to £110,000 – one of the largest single investments it has ever made in a documentary. This doesn’t include the script and development backing which the project had already received.
Compass also has another doc already in production: Varado: The Curse of Gold. This is being made together with Yuzu Productions (France) and has financing from France Télévisions, CNC and Creative Europe. It will be presented in the Hot Docs Forum next month. It is about ‘garimpeiros, clandestine gold-panners who venture to French Guiana to land that sits on top of one of the planet’s largest gold resources. Their world is a modern day Wild West, “full of gangs, smugglers, killers and sex workers.” The gold-panners show little regard for the environment as they tear intro the earth beneath the primal forest. The film follows Maria, Ricard, Cleber and Junior who have all left Brazil “to gamble their entire lives on a few grams of gold.”
The film is directed by Nicos Argillet and Stephane Correa. Millard is producing alongside Yuzu’s Christian Popp.
Meanwhile, Compass is also developing a hugely ambitious film about illustrator and character designer Charles Thorson (1890-1966), famous for his work on early versions of Bugs Bunny and who worked for both Disney and Warner Bros. Thorson was Canadian but of Icelandic descent. The film will combine live action, animation and re-enactments.
