Rúnar Rúnarsson's Echo is showing August 5 - September 3, 2020 on MUBI in the series Festival Focus: Locarno Film Festival.
Echo is a film where reality was captured, initiated and staged. The timeline of the film is the advent season of December 2018 to New Year’s day 2019, shot in Iceland. In this sometimes stressful time of year it’s easy to lose track of ourselves and get disconnected from our surroundings. At the same time, the dusk of the year fuels self-reflection and enables us to put our lives into perspective, often evoking empathy for others.
Each individual in the film will only appear in a single scene and therefore there won’t be a main character. Each scene is an observing, static one slate shot on a tripod. Time is only broken when there is a cut between scenes. By themselves, these scenes either tell a short story or capture a mood or an emotion, but together they form a whole. It will be a kind of mosaic picture that functions as an echo from postmodern society, a contemporary mirror.
Without light there would be no shadow and most of the time we find ourselves somewhere on the grey scale between those two.
“The gray scale of life” is a vital element of my writing and my filmmaking in general. The mundane path we walk searching for happiness, looking for meaning. If we wander into the shadows then the knowledge of light is what can guide us, and when we step into the brightest light we know how lucky we are because we know the darkness.
I use fragments of reality to express a narrative and the narrative to portray emotions. The reason I make films is to convey emotions, and my shadow is always heavily on the subject matter.
In Echo I want to reflect on our contemporary society using the Christmas season as a time frame. The narrative approach is like picking up stones on the beach. Each stone is special in some way and united, assembled into a mosaic picture, they create a whole.
I'm so excited and proud to have Echo available for the MUBI audience.
