Sofia De Vera combines a heartfelt passion for cinema with over 15 years of critiquing for esteemed film publications, wielding academic credentials from the University of Southern California and New York University, to serve as your personal guide through the enchanting worlds of film and television. Her full guest bio can be found here.
Big mountains, rocky beaches, volcanic black deserts, frozen lakes, fields full of snow and ice, and impressive glaciers galore… Iceland’s scenery has a lot to offer for filmmakers all over the world.
And those beautiful, unique and sometimes rugged backdrops have been the backdrop for many (if not all) of the movies set in Iceland, while its story is not always set in Iceland at all. Even Hollywood seems to now be in on the open secret and discovered that Iceland is a close-to-perfect shooting location nowadays.
Especially the town of Vík in South Iceland which has been visited by numerous big Hollywood film crews in just the past few years. And it is these emblematic natural elements that have attracted (and continue to attract) storytellers throughout the history of modern cinema and today the spirit of Iceland has been immortalized in distinct films resulting in a wonderfully convoluted and exceptional array of movies set in Iceland.
We love this range because one of the reasons why we watch movies is that they are an excellent way to travel to different places while staying at home – and to determine if a destination elicits that oh-so-important spirit of wanderlust in us before ever investing in a ticket there.
It is this ‘travel via cinema’ that first motivated us to visit Portugal, Greece, and Philadelphia – among many other places. We love chasing the high from those glorious moments you can step out in a real-world location and feel spontaneously transported back inside to an iconic movie scene (and judging by the abiding popularity of visiting Middle Earth / New Zealand or James Bond’s Skyfall, we are not the only ones!)
In Iceland, of course, such magical places exist too, many of which are considered iconic landmarks of Iceland – and some which can even be experienced via freedom camping!
In the following paragraphs, we will take a dive into some of Iceland’s best films and the extraordinary places where they take place.
Wondering where to watch? It depends on where you live in the world and which streaming services you have. We link to the streaming service we watch on in each case - be it Netflix, Amazon Prime, Apple TV+, or elsewhere.
You can get one month free of Amazon Prime (or a 6-month trial for students) of Amazon Prime and also get immediate access to FREE Two Day shipping, Amazon Video, and Music. While you won't be charged for your free trial, you'll be upgraded to a paid membership plan automatically at the end of the trial period - though if you have already binged all these, you could just cancel before the trial ends.
Apple TV+ also has a one-week trial, and Hulu has a one-month trial (which can be bundled with Disney!). Another option might be using a VPN to access Netflix titles locked to other regions. Netflix is now available in more than 190 countries worldwide and each country has a different library and availability. US Netflix is (understandably) one of the best.
While we wish everything could just be in one place - for now, it seems these are the best streaming platforms to watch on.
Page Contents
Sons Of The Soil (1920)
Sons of the Soil is a Danish silent film directed by Gunnar Sommerfeldt and starring Philip Bech, Gudrun Indriadottir, and Elisabeth Jacobsen. The movie is about Örlygur Borg’s two sons, Ormar and Ketill, who live in Iceland. They are both in love with the beautiful Rúna, and this causes friction and eventually a fight between the two brothers.
Sons of the Soil was filmed on location in various places in Iceland. Not much is known in terms of actual locations. But since it is the very first motion picture to be shot in Iceland, and it has supposedly been responsible for kick-starting Icelandic cinema, we felt it definitely deserved a spot on this list.