Heartstone

Be patient with Heartstone...because, in time, it will simply take your breath away.

Remote and beautiful, complex and frustrating...young lives teetering on the cliff of adulthood...in a close-knit community, where everyone knows everyone else's business and reputations are created and cremated out of gossip and boredom!

Every small community has its stereotypes, no exception here...the bully, the drunk, the promiscuous, the dysfunction. There's a brutality here...a brutality that urbanites fail to grasp...if you are of a sensitive nature, the opening scene will invoke rage...fishing is - indeed - cruel. Killing for food is one thing, killing for the sake of it...is an entirely different matter! Guðmundsson frames his film with this harsh reality.

For one so young, Baldur Einarsson delivers an astonishing performance...still a boy, grappling with the onset of puberty and the love he has...for his best friend. This 'love' takes the audience through emotionally charged twists and turns...culminating in three scenes that will have you sobbing, incontrollably...it simply is breathtaking what this filmmaker and young actor have managed to achieve.

A film that so deserves a wider audience...but, sadly, it seems to have been limited to film festival screen, despite its hefty and deserved win at Venice.

Seek it out, Heartstone delivers a rare emotional wallop...accompanied by a ray of sunshine peeking out from behind the dark clouds!

Trailer...