‘Unnur’ Finds Grace & Beauty in the Great Outdoors

There are so many haunting, revelatory moments in Unnur, filmmaker Chris Burkard’s short film about Elli Thor — an Icelandic adventure photographer and single dad raising Unnur, his eight-year-old daughter, on Iceland’s remote, windswept coast — it’s hard to know where to begin.

Unnur is just 19 minutes long, and yet it has more to say about parenting — and life — than many feature-length films. Its sensitive and stirring and has an almost ethereal quality to it. Unnur was a labor of love, and it shows.

As a film, it could so easily have been mawkish and sentimental, and yet Unnur doesn’t shy away from tragedy and life’s frailties, and how a near-death experience, the result of an unfortunate — and nearly deadly — decision while kayaking Iceland’s remote coastline, shaped Thor’s future attitude toward life.

There’s something really tender about the way this seasoned cold-water surfer and devil-may-care outdoor photographer gently coaxes his young daughter to learn the ways of the wild. He is awed by her grace and natural innocence, and how intuitively she adopts the ways of the wilderness; she, in turn, thinks her dad is neat, and is awed by his moral strength and seeming invincibility.

As a film, Unnur is simply exquisite. The images flow together in a slipstream of conscious thought and unspoken epiphanies, linked by powerful and yet often understated music.

As a life lesson, Unnur asks the basic questions that face any parent: Am I doing the best I can to give this tiny human being the confidence to forge her own path in life? Will she be happy?

Unnur takes her name from one of the Norse god Thor’s nine daughters, but in reality she’s just a normal kid, exploring the rocky coastline like any other beach-combing eight-year-old might. “Home” is a remote A-frame cabin battered by the North Atlantic winds and storms that sweep in periodically off the sea, and her schoolroom is the rocky tidelines of one of the world’s most remote and untamed coasts.

©Chris Burkard Studio for YouTube

Her dad shares joint custody of Unnur with her mother, but the girl’s mother appears only briefly in the film, when he drops her off at her home in town. It’s a voice that seems missing in such a personal narrative, but there it is. The film is only 19 minutes long, after all.

The father wants to instil in his daughter his passion for the sea, which seeped into his being when his own parents raised him outdoors; his mother was one of Iceland’s first female search-and-rescue team members.

He grew up navigating sea kayaks, and was good at it — until he almost drowned one day in a waterfalling accident just two years before Unnur was born. He was lucky to survive. 

That accident changed his outlook on life, and how quickly and arbitrarily it can be taken away.

He was wracked by survivor’s guilt for a long time — why did he survive where so many others would have perished? — and then his daughter was born. He realized then what he had been put on this Earth to do.

Unnur is a quiet film, introspective and contemplative and gorgeous to look at. There’s no narration, other than Thor’s voiceover, in English with a thick Nordic accent, and little to no dialogue. Unnur herself has one line, at the very end. At 19 minutes Unnur is more visual tone poem than a straight narrative, and it’s better for it.

The film is a paean to nature and the natural world, and how children learn to make life decisions for themselves, over time, with a soft-touch helping hand from parents who themselves are often trying to figure out the world and how it works.

We often sense the miracle of life while in the wilderness, in meaningful ways that cast the frenzy of our modern-day world into the shade. At its heart  Unnur is about the connectedness we experience with natural spaces, that whispered voice, the hidden presence, when we think we’re alone.

“The world is big,” the naturalist John Muir once said, “and I want to have a good gook at it before it gets dark.”

Unnur is not dark. It’s a shining beacon in the darkness of so much of what’s happening in the world today. The poetry of the Earth is never dead, the poet John Keats wrote.

Unnur is living proof.

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Coldplay’s ‘Everyday Life’: A Vow To Go Carbon Neutral.

“Our next tour will be the best possible version of a tour like that environmentally. We would be disappointed it it’s not carbon neutral. We’ve done a lot of tours at this point. How do we turn it around so it’s not so much taking as giving?”

— Chris Martin, Coldplay

Preach about sustainability and the environment to the unwashed masses, then stage a massive rock concert in the middle of San Francisco, drawing enough electricity — generated by hydroelectric dams and fossil fuels, no doubt — to power a small moon: That was the unflattering picture the cartoon South Park painted of Bono and U2 in a typically acerbic episode a number of years back. San Francisco, South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone noted, is shrouded in an impenetrable cloud of “smug” that hangs over the city year-round and permeates every waking moment of every liberal being in that famously liberal city.

That’s not the reason Coldplay frontman Chris Martin recently confirmed that Coldplay will not tour in the coming year until they find a way to go completely green. Coldplay have the means and wherewithal to pass on a lucrative world tour — they have sold more 90 million records worldwide, after all — even though they have just released a new album, Everyday Life. Normally bands go on tour to publicize a new album. Record companies reap the lion’s share of profits from album sales; touring is often the only way a band can make money for themselves and themselves alone, despite the expense involved.  

Coldplay, who have supported the NGO Oxfam for a number of years now, have vowed not to tour this time until they’ve figured out a way to make touring as environmentally friendly as possible — “actively beneficial” to the environment, as frontman Martin told BBC News late last week. In other words: carbon neutral.

One can imagine the South Park creators may be conceiving a sequel to their U2 episode as you read — they may call it, in an homage to Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit, “The Desolation of Smug” — but there’s every indication Coldplay mean what they say.

The band Funkasy.com dubbed “the biggest pop band of this era” have famously staged the biggest ight shows this side of Pink Floyd,

but that time has passed, Martin told BBC, and not just because of Greta Thunberg.  Concert tours are often mounted on a scale that requires dozens of trucks, just to transport equipment.

Coldplay have already managed to grab headlines with an impromptu, unannounced unplugged concert in Amman, Jordan just days ago; a 28-minute video of the concert, filmed against a backdrop of one of the oldest, longest established cities in the history of humankind, has gone viral on YouTube, with 1.6 million view at last count. 

They topped that off Monday with a one-off concert at London’s Natural History Museum, with all proceeds going to the environmental law charity ClientEarth.

Music critics are dismissive toward Coldplay as a band — unfairly, to my mind — but there’s no question Martin and his bandmates Jon Champion, and touch the popular nerve.

Just witness this comment by musician and self-confessed Coldplay fan Mo Sharkawi on YouTube:

This is not just an album release — this is a mark in the history of music.

First live full album launch.

Millions around (the world) were there.

State of the art live videography.

State of the art life sound quality.

First album launch for a major band from one of the most misrepresented regions on the planet — the beautiful, historic Middle East. Super grateful to witness this incredible moment.

Coldplay have talked the talk on climate justice and sustainability throughout the band’s 23-year history. They’ve talked the talk, but now they appear determined to put words into action.