We had the chance to speak to a small sampling of this year’s Sundance Screenwriters Lab Fellows and first up was a filmmaker from Iceland and a graduate of Columbia University’s MFA film program in Katla Sólnes. After completed a quartet of low budget shorts (the four classical elements) she now focuses on a project that turns back the clock to a very specific event in Iceland’s history but the shake-up is felt on a human level as well as a natural disaster angle. Recipient of the Sundance Institute | Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, we discussed how her shorts informed the writing process for Eruption (her feature debut) along with the looking closely at the setting and the character-set.
Sundance project synopsis: In the highlands of Iceland in 1972, a geologist’s wife finds her marriage tested when a wily American student arrives, stirring tensions as volatile as the volcanic landscape.
