Heima by Sigur Ros

“Sigur Ros’ creativity and open attitude was at one with Iceland’s ravishingly beautiful landscape.” – Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian In the endless magic hour of the Icelandic summer, Sigur Ros played a series of concerts around their homeland. Combining both the biggest and smallest shows of their career, the entire tour was filmed, and provides a unique insight into one of the world’s shyest and least understood bands captured live in their natural habitat. The culmination of more than a year spent promoting their hugely successful Takk… album around the world, the Icelandic tour was free to all-comers and went largely unannounced. Playing in deserted fish factories, outsider art follies, far-flung community halls, sylvan fields, darkened caves and the hoofprint of Odin’s horse, Sleipnir, the band reached an entirely new spectrum of the Icelandic population; young and old, ardent and merely quizzical, entirely by word-of-mouth. The question of the way Sigur Ros’s music relates to, and is influenced by, their environment has been reduced to a journalistic cliche about glacial majesty and fire and ice, but there is no doubt that the band are inextricably linked to the land in which they were forged. And the decision to film this first-ever Sigur Ros film in Iceland was, in the end, ineluctable. Shot using a largely Icelandic crew (to minimise Eurovision-style scenic-wonder overload), Heima – which means both “at home” and “homeland” – is an attempt to make a film every bit as big, beautiful and unfettered as a Sigur Ros album. As such it was always going to be something of a grand folie, but one, which taking in no fewer than 15 locations around Iceland (including the country’s largest ever concert at the band’s Reykjavik homecoming), is never less than epic in its ambition. Material from all four of the band’s albums is featured, including many rare and notable moments. Among these are a heart-s