The Oquendo bar began embodying the Lobster soup documentary project at the Festival three years ago. Pepe Andreu and Rafael Molés from SUICAfilms met with Jose Luis Rubio from REC. The Valencians wanted to tell the story of a special bar in a small Icelandic town. “Two months later we were recording in Iceland,” Andreu explains. A year later, the project took part in the Four Winds Documentary Co-Production Forum at the San Sebastian Festival, where it won the Ibaia and Treeline Distribution awards.
The forum gave a huge boost to the project as they made it public and started opening the doors for the working group. Knowing that they sparked people’s interest gave the authors peace of mind, and as Molés points out, “it’s worth putting the project to the test, after all you’re alone for a long time with your project, and sharing it with others on those days is fundamental”.
Enchanted tourists
Grindavik is a small fishing village in the south of Iceland. People all over the planet want to know the mysterious country; they are fascinated to see volcanoes, ice and landscapes reminiscent of the creation of the Earth. The village is close to the Blue Lagoon geothermal spa, which attracts a large number of tourists, and suddenly the village has become a tourist attraction. There is the small Bryggjan café, a meeting place for a community and a refuge that has become a soul. Pepe Andreu and Rafael Molés got to know the place in 2006: “As soon as you entered, you saw the premises, the decor and the people and realized that you were breathing something special,” says Andreu. Real people, in a real place.
They decided there was a story worth telling. In fact, local musicians, poets, old fishermen, the last Icelandic boxer, the person who translated Don Quixote from Spanish into Icelandic, and so on,
they mingled with tourists every day at the old pier bar, and a special atmosphere was created day in and day out. Along the way, they enlisted the help of Icelandic screenwriter and producer Ólafur Rögnbaldsson to bridge the gap with local culture.
When the documentary filmmakers returned eleven years later, the owners of the bar, brothers Kristinn and Adalgeir Johansen, warned them that the premises were about to be sold. A chain had planned to build a hotel and admitted to them that they had received an irrefutable offer. “If we have an ending, we thought about it,” Molés says. But the reality is stubborn and offered the filmmakers a surprising and rounded ending.
Through the mosaic of the daily life of the Bryggjan cafe, Andreu and Molés for tourism
the documentary deals with influence, gentrification and the dangers of globalization. “Icelanders viewed tourism with fascination, as a new hope; and for us, coming from where we came from and knowing what we lived through was like a dejà vù, ”explains Rafael Molés. A clear example of this is that in 2018, 1.5 million tourists arrived in Iceland, a lone island with a population of 350,000.