Runar Runarsson | Short Films

The art of existential nakedness

«Melodrama is not for Nordic people» – this was the answer of the Icelandic filmmaker Runar Runarsson to a question coming from the Finnish audience of his masterclass at the Tampere Film Festival, a question about a certain lack of physical emotionality in his films. Yet, renouncing melodrama does not mean any reduction of drama. On the contrary, frozen facial expressions or calm during scenes of violence can convey the highest dramatic tension. Even the absence of dialogue, if it is well orchestrated in the montage, can work more effectively than shouting or a verbal outburst. In this respect, Runarsson is a refined master of drama, mostly for his capacity to tell the interiority of his characters through a landscape, a gesture, or an unexpected pause in the flow of action. From this perspective, dialogue is sometimes more important for their prosodic value than for the meaning of the words. With such a filmic style, it is not surprising that during the masterclass he sharply criticized the current habit, in the production of films, of paying almost exclusively attention to the script.

In Tampere, the combination of his masterclass and the screening of his short films has been a wonderful occasion to seize Runarsson’s art of filmmaking. His first short film, The Last Farm (2004), already perfectly exemplified this style where the situations within the story (an old farmer working tirelessly to prepare the burial of his wife – and his own! – before his daughter will discover it) prevail over verbalisation for the expression of the characters’ psychology. This is why the filmmaker largely focuses on the rehearsal with the actors, which is mainly made of discussion and understanding rather than the repetition of the scenes. During this important work of preparation, Runarsson confesses his original technique of exploring the film location through walking in circles around the shooting place together with the actors. The place thus becomes the space of resonance for the characters’ feelings, to which an accurate work on framing will be the necessary complement.

All of this probably explains the impression of authenticity that seems to be his signature as a filmmaker. “Authenticity” is a vague term and, if I would try to describe such impression, I should speak of a specific nakedness that the characters exhibit, because the dramaturgy of the films inevitably leads to the exposure of their emotions or just their being. I think that it is within this particular poetic context that we should consider how effective nudity marks crucial scenes in his three other short films, 2 Birds (2008), Anna (2009), and O (2024). As the main character of O is a father broken by alcoholism, Ingvar Eggert Sigurdsson’s mature body shares with the young girls of the other two films the same mixture of force and fragility. This is a mixture that dramatically expresses an existential tension, between innocence and abuse, solitude and desire, love and addiction.

Is this existential nakedness the reason why Runarsson has realised so many films with teenagers? Through films like 2 Birds and Anna, we certainly understand how he could so masterfully direct young actors in his features Sparrows (2015) and, more recently, When the Light Breaks (2025). And, more generally, his attention to the short format clearly explains how he could conceive his Echo (2019) as a series of vignettes. In any case, the Tampere encounter with him and his short films has convinced me that existential nakedness is something that pulses at the core of his art of filmmaking.