Hlynur Pálmason | Short Films

Hlynur Pálmason’s shorts: prolonged time, intimate space

Landscape is expanse: air icy cold, surrounded by water, with grass turning from green to brown and then the other way round. The cinema of the Icelandic filmmaker Hlynur Pálmason has a particular northern-light atmosphere, something spacious and resonant with emptiness, documenting the passing of time through the sky’s shifting colours and visibly changing seasons while also finding the dramatic in the routines of life and the joys of play – and in art projects that breathe with nature’s rhythm, able to disappear without regret when it is time to go. Events are cyclical, projects are longitudinal, efforts are made day after day. With a lucid understanding of this art form, in his shorts he has freer rein to explore all these aspects, space to document and experiment, and the animating belief seems to be that a fixed frame can become a meditative and poetic film if it is carefully composed and planned, filmed every day over a prolonged period of time.

In Nest (2022) and Joan of Arc (2025), we see his kids, playing the role of kids: building a tree house supported by a single thick trunk and metal wires fixed to the ground, or digging a hole in order to erect a Joan of Arc-like figure on a pole for archery. His family is filmed and acts with such sincerity and genuinely heartfelt feeling. Everything appears so natural and so real, and yet everything is fictional and scripted; it is a trompe l’oeil for the audience, blurring where a film begins and where life begins. Pálmason’s camera is simply there, remaining static, a presence the protagonists probably forget about after a certain point. This is an anti-industry way of working, marked by spontaneity and personal idiosyncrasy; instead of envisioning a project and developing it for years before being able to shoot anything, he runs several projects at the same time, returning to them repeatedly over a long period. He will step out of his house to film if he sees that the weather is bad – because he likes the drama in nature; in an ordinary family chat, he will discuss with his kids filming the next morning before they go to school.

It is the kind of cinema that prioritises emotional experience and respects the passing of time. In nature we see temporality in such a dignified way: seasons alternate, clouds come and go. Pálmason records time and shows time in ellipsis in his short films, condensing several months or years into the span of a short film. His cinematic universe, it seems, is a time capsule that captures the changes of changes in microclimates and the growing up of children.

[…] It’s the kind of charm that only emerges when the groundedness of art-making and filmmaking becomes one, growing out of his closeness to nature, his understanding of life’s tempo, and his ultimate trust in the chemistry between people and space.

This duration-focused cinematic time works together with his space; all of his films are shot in his natural habitat. He said, at the Diagonale in Graz 2026, where all of his feature-length films and most of his shorts are programmed into the section “Position”, that this span of time and familiar space are the necessities for the film to reveal itself. His films are like an organic being that germinates and grows at the pace of nature. All the sober observation, like a surgical knife cutting straight through the Nordic landscape, opens out into metaphor. If the metaphors of a drowning man and those indifferent fishermen in their boat are relatively translucent, the futility of erecting a pole and then destroying it is akin to an eastern philosophy of Zen: coming-into-being and perishability are one, all things are born to perish. For someone who follows the rhythm of nature, ephemerality is that one flower that reveals the entire world.

Or we see a camera panning from one boat to another, everyone aboard absorbed in their own thoughts or the fishing work at hand, until, at the end of Seven Boats (2014), a man is in the sea, struggling to breathe. In his only black-and-white film, his cinematic time is real time, and suspense comes from the off-screen space towards which the camera is panning. In A Painter (2013), a painter who fathers children without being there for them co-creates an installation with his son on the farm while struggling to be fatherly within his self-absorbed artist’s life. It is within the family that the sweetest moments and the most brutal moments unfold in equal measure: a place where siblings play and work together, wrestle one another to the floor, and also a place where art might get in the way of genuine fatherly or spousal coexistence. This earth-art-making, at the centre of A Painter, as well as the practice of building and installing in Nest and Joan of Arc, is a form of play in Pálmason’s shorts, an in-depth engagement with the earth in the most visceral way: earth is dug out with different tools in order to erect a pole, or to open up a wooden pallet for a show opening. And filmmaking becomes a way of letting the camera roll as a quiet accompaniment to play, with this unique quality of seeming casual and nonchalant while being, in fact, clean-cut and precise. It’s the kind of charm that only emerges when the groundedness of art-making and filmmaking becomes one, growing out of his closeness to nature, his understanding of life’s tempo, and his ultimate trust in the chemistry between people and space.

As much as his mise-en-scène in Icelandic nature is a character in itself, changing mood on a whim, in his films we see installations, and at the same time his films are an installation of time. It’s a personal cinema, a cinema of gestures that shows the process of building and doing, or simply being.