Jar City | |
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Directed by | Baltasar Kormákur |
Produced by | Agnes Johansen Lilja Pálmadóttir |
Written by | Arnaldur Indriðason |
Starring |
Ágústa Eva Erlendsdóttir Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson |
Music by | Mugison |
Cinematography | Bergsteinn Björgúlfsson |
Edited by | Elísabet Ronaldsdóttir |
Release date
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Running time
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91 minutes |
Country | Iceland Germany Denmark |
Language | Icelandic |
Box office | $748,315 |
Jar City (Icelandic: Mýrin – "The Bog") is a 2006 Icelandic film directed by Baltasar Kormákur. It is based on Mýrin, a novel written by Arnaldur Indriðason and released in English as Jar City.
Kormákur is in the midst of producing an English-language remake, also called Jar City, which will be set in Louisiana.
A world-weary cop comes to believe a recent murder of a middle-aged man is linked to a case of possible rape three decades earlier by a group of friends and a corrupt cop. Working through, he finds it linked to neurofibromatosis, a rare disease among Nordics. One thing leads to another and he puts the pieces together. A geneticist father loses his child to neurofibromatosis and his search for answers leads to his degenerate father and unravels many missing person cases during the decade.
Like the book on which it is based, the film is implicitly a semi-critique to the gene-gathering work of the Icelandic company deCODE genetics.
The score was composed by Mugison.
Track listing:
Incidental music: Extract from George Frideric Handel's "The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba" from the oratorio Solomon
The film was awarded the Crystal Globe Grand Prix at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in 2007. It also won the Breaking Waves Award at the 15th Titanic International Film Festival in Budapest with a €10,000 prize; the film was screened with the title Bloodline.
A Blockbuster Exclusive Region 1 DVD was released in the U.S. and Canada. Otherwise, the film was not released commercially in America. It has also been released on DVD in Europe and is available on iTunes.