Icelandic filmmaker Smari Gunn leads a double life. He is not just a director but also works as an actor and voice artist – and one of his credits was on animated blockbuster Happy Feet. “I voiced one of the Latino penguins. They were Robin Williams’ little gang. It wasn’t a huge role but I did have to speak Icelandic with a warm Latino accent – which is I think the first time that has ever been attempted.”
Gunn’s crowd-pleasing new documentary The Home Game, co-directed with Logi Sigursveinsson, could also be described as a story about happy feet. The film (receiving its UK premiere this week at the Glasgow Film Festival and sold by Met Film Sales) is set in the small west Icelandic town of Reynir.
Back in 1996, Reynir’s football team lost an away match 10-0 against a golf club from Grindavík. It was a painful humiliation. In the intervening years, the town’s beautiful football pitch was never used.
To exorcise the memory of the ten-goal drubbing and to get the pitch used, local actor and theatre owner Kári Viðarsson, whose father was involved in the ignominious defeat, has the idea of putting a team back together and competing in the Icelandic FA Cup.
This, then, is an underdog story – and it’s a funny and uplifting one.
Gunn had been to Reynir before, appearing as an actor in a stage show at the Freezer, the hostel and cultural centre that Viðarsson runs. He knew the community. Logi Sigursveinsson grew up in a nearby town. Both directors were contacted individually by Viðarsson who let them know about his dreams to revive the local football team. They didn’t know each other but soon they were filming together, following the re-birth of the team.
“It became such a beautiful and fruitful working relationship between me and him,” Gunn says of his collaboration with Sigursveinsson.
The film had an obvious structure. The two directors were determined to film the team’s first home game in the cup. Of course, if the team was drawn away from home, that would sabotage the documentary altogether.
“Kári [Viðarsson] is very impulsive and a little bit clumsy too. He didn’t completely think it through but we just thought it would be an interesting story either way, but…there was a lucky star we were under during the whole process.”
Much of the documentary was shot during the pandemic but the filmmakers deliberately took out all the references to Covid. They didn’t want to remind audiences of that grim period. Almost everything seemed to go in their favour. The team did indeed secure a home fixture, against opponents from the top division. When the match was finally played, it had more twists than you will find in the most elaborately scripted sports movies.
“I don’t think we could have written it any better. If we had written it, people would have told us, no, that could never happen. That’s…cheesy!”
For all of Kári’s efforts as coach and inspirational leader, the filmmakers had been very nervous about the match. They feared that the makeshift team he had thrown together with youngsters, paunchy middle-aged old-timers and a woman who once played at elite level would be hammered. They’d lost by 10 goals in 1996 and it was quite possible the margin of defeat was going to be even bigger this time round. That, though, wasn’t how it turned out.
“They [the team] played at probably 200% – at least 100% over what they would normally be able to do. I’d like to believe that us filming their journey did spur them on…and this was one of the strongest teams they could have faced in the first round. It was super-impressive. We couldn’t believe how well they were doing.”
Gunn himself is London-based. His wife Stephanie Thorpe produced the documentary alongside Heather Millard, Freyja Kristinsdottir and Elfar Adalsteins.
They started filming a year before the first round of the cup.
“We did a few trips. We filmed overall, I think, 33 or 34 days over the year. We would go and do long weekends where we would set up interviews and would try to identify the potential heroes. Obviously, we filmed a lot more people than we actually follow in the [completed] film. We could probably have made a five-hour long film with all the really nice stories we came across.”
When Kári starts the team, he has only a couple of players at his disposal. The closer it gets to the match, the bigger the squad becomes.
The tone of the storytelling is always optimistic. Nothing gets Kári or his team mates down. “They’re so happy go lucky, glass half full,” the director says of the community. “They always see the funny side of things.”
Even that embarrassing 10-0 defeat a quarter of a century ago is regarded with wry and fatalistic humour by those who played in the match.
Meanwhile, the efforts to re-form the team show Kári trying to impress his father “and kind of rekindle their relationship.” The father had turned away from football after the defeat but has now fallen back in love with the beautiful game. “Kári really took a long way round to try to win his dad back!”
Mitch Clare of London-based Met Film Sales approached the team behind The Home Game just before its premiere at Nordisk Panorama (where it won the Audience Award). “He had heard some good things. He wanted to get a screener. I believe he ran back to his hotel room to watch it on the night. He told us he loved it.”
When Gunn and Sigursveinsson looked at the Met Films catalogue, they realised their film would fit in well there, alongside other crowd-pleasing titles about underdogs like A Bunch of Amateurs, Kim Hopkins’ hit film about the members of an amateur film club in Bradford. They were reassured that Met Films “would understand what we were trying to do with our film and how to get it out there. Obviously, it is a very local story.”
Since Nordisk Panorama, the film has screened at events from Doc NYC to Tromsø International Film Festival, from Budapest and, now, to Glasgow.
Wherever it has shown, it has connected with audiences. “People scream and shout during the football game as if they’re watching a live broadcast of the World Cup Final.”
In Iceland itself, the film stayed in cinemas for well over a month. The country’s football community has given it an especially warm reception. President of the Iceland FA Gudni Bergsson (a former captain of Bolton Wanderers) features briefly in the film and is a diehard fan. So is Arnar Gunnlaugsson, boss of Víkingur and reckoned to be one of Iceland’s best managers (who gave the film a glowing review). A special screening was held for the Icelandic women’s team before one of their games. “They loved it!”
A fervent Liverpool fan himself, Gunn is currently planning to work with former Iceland national team goalkeeper turned filmmaker Hannes Þór Halldórsson on a crime drama adapted from a Nordic noir novel. He also has a few acting jobs in the pipeline.
And, yes, talking of Icelandic underdogs, Kári enjoyed that famous match at Euro 2016 when Iceland beat Roy Hodgson’s hapless England team. He watched it in a bar in England. “It was 50% Icelandic people who live in London and 50% England fans. To be fair to the England fans, they said we deserved it but we felt a bit awkward. I think it was a very bad week actually…it was the week of Brexit, an interesting week in England!”
