The Deep

Drawing from actual events as well as screenwriter Jon Atli Jonasson’s one-hander stage play about a fisherman’s seemingly impossible survival at sea, Iceland’s most prolific filmmaker, Baltasar Kormákur, has created an unexpectedly and effectively low-key portrait of an Everyman under extraordinary circumstances. Although part of a rough-and-tumbled corps of hardy fishing folk, Gulli (Kormkur regular Ólafur Darri Ólafsson) finds himself the only survivor when the boat he’s working on capsizes off Iceland’s formidable coast. Immediately transformed into a national hero and the object of scientific curiosity, the character of Gulli clearly represents something special for Kormákur: a representative of a nation which itself has faced economic capsizing, and is now steadying the ship of state. A Focus World release.