Rams

A remote farming valley in the north of Iceland. Gummi and Kiddi are brothers, two old bachelors who live on neighbouring farms, raise the same prize-winning breed of sheep, and have not spoken to each other in forty years. When they need to communicate, a sheepdog carries the message. Then a deadly disease, scrapie, is found in the valley, and the authorities order every sheep to be slaughtered. For men whose whole lives are their flocks, it is the end of everything. Each of the brothers reacts in his own way, and neither of them is going to give up quietly.

Grímur Hákonarson tells this story with a very dry, very Icelandic sense of humour. The landscape is vast and grey, the farmhouses are small and lonely, and the silence between the two brothers is so absurd it becomes funny. Sigurður Sigurjónsson as the quiet, careful Gummi and Theodór Júlíusson as the wild, drunken Kiddi are both wonderful, two stubborn bearded faces that tell you everything about a lifetime of pride and hurt. There is a scene with a front loader and a hospital that I will never forget.

Underneath the comedy, it is a moving film about brotherhood, about a way of life that is disappearing, and about what is left when you lose the thing you have lived for. The ending, out in a snowstorm, is one of the most beautiful and unexpected in Nordic cinema. It won the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes and the Golden Alexander at Thessaloniki. Funny, tender and unforgettable.