Enjoy December 31 in Iceland again and again to the music of L.A. Indie rockers The Lamps. This song is a remix of a track in the film called “I am Richard Burton.” The new year is already getting happy for Decoding Iceland, as the film is about to make its West Coast Debut at [...]
One more video with music from the movie. This one highlights L.A. Rock band The Lamps. The song is titled “I am Richard Burton” from the EP Please come down.
Another music video from Decoding Iceland. This time, it’s a composition by Icelander Veigar Margeirsson, who currently resides in Los Angeles and makes movie music. Check his website at http://www.veigar.com/
Decoding Iceland offers a time-lapse look at Iceland’s wild ride through the last decades, and how it fits patterns of an 1100-year history. The film follows the rise and fall of a genetics company, the government that enabled it, and the culture that brought about that government. In the 1990s Decode Genetics arrived, claiming it would find [...]
Here’s a short video highlighting the music of Jonathan Miller, one of the contributing composers to “Decoding Iceland.” Stay tuned for more tuneage…
Now available on Video On Demand at http://vimeo.com/ondemand/decodingiceland Decoding Iceland is an official selection of the Reykjavik International Film Festival and the L.A. Scandinavian Film Festival.
Decoding Iceland offers a time-lapse look at Iceland’s wild ride through the last decades, and how it fits patterns of an 1100-year history.
The film follows the rise and fall of a genetics company, the government that enabled it, and the culture that brought about that government.
In the 1990s Decode Genetics arrived, claiming it would find breakthrough cures due to Iceland’s isolation and extensive health care data. In spite of ethical questions, gold fever swept a nation that invested heavily in the firm, hoping to get rich quick. Over the next decade, over one-third of the Icelandic population donated blood samples and medical records to the company while it lost hundreds of millions, bankrupting numerous Icelanders.
Amidst Iceland’s financial meltdown in 2009, the company itself went bankrupt, and ultimately got sold -along with 140,000 DNA samples and medical records- to US pharmaceutical giant AMGEN.
Decoding Iceland raises the question: Did Iceland do the world a favor and help science, or was the nation suckered out of a valuable resource in a slick case of bio-piracy via bankruptcy? This part of Iceland’s Saga is a warning to countries new to the free market: There is no easy money. And as long as the greedy can cash in natural resources at the expense of the nation, Iceland will remain
“The Banana Republic of the North.”
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