FRIDRIK THOR FRIDRIKSSON who will receive a Lifetime Achievemnet Award, was born in Iceland in 1954. Almost totally self-educated in cinematography, he started making 16mm films while still in high school. He ran the University’s film club, founded Iceland’s first film magazine and helped set up the Reykjavik Film Festival which he chairs at present. Fridriksson directed non-conventional documentaries, such as “Rock in Reykjavik” (1982) and “Icelandic Cowboys” (1984), before his first feature, “White Whales” (1987). He then directed several films for Icelandic Television before making “Children of Nature” (1991), which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1992, apart from receiving no less than twenty three other international prizes.
“Movie Days” (1994) followed up on the success of “Children of Nature” with a wider cinema release abroad given to any Icelandic film before. It was awarded the “Nordic Amanda” prize as the best Scandinavian film of 1994. Cold Fever (1995), Fridriksson’s most international production, has earned a world-wide distribution and been enthusiastically received by critics and audiences alike. Its many international prizes include “The Rosebud” at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1995.
Fridriksson’s company the Icelandic Film Corporation has been involved in almost every Icelandic film made in recent years as well as co-producing several international productions.
As a film-maker Fridriksson has been compared to both contemporaries such as Jim Jarmush and Aki Kaurismäki as well as classical film-maker John Ford and Akira Kurosawa.
Movies, as Fridriksson sees them, are part of nation’s identity. Fridriksson’s own identity as a film-maker is that of a storyteller within a tradition that goes back to the writers of the Icelandic Sagas, more than a thousand years ago.
