Heima : The Sigur Ros Tour Around Iceland
2006 Documentary

Heima

In 2006, having toured the world over, Sigur Ros returned home to play a series of free, unannounced concerts in Iceland. ‘Heima’ is a unique record of that tour filmed in 16 locations across the island, taking in the biggest and smallest shows of the band's career.

‘Heima’ is a 97 minute documentary feature film featuring songs from all four Sigur Ros albums alongside previously unreleased material and, on disc two of the DVD release, a brand new song, also titled ‘Heima’.

Heim

The six songs that make up 'Heim' are acoustic versions of material taken from all four Sigur Ros’s albums. They were recorded in Iceland either during the band’s summer 2006 tour or in spring 2007. All songs are live recordings.

A couple of years back, when the idea of making the live film that would become ‘Heima’ was first discussed, it was agreed that there should be a live album to accompany it. When the band came to listen back to the material that had been captured on the road, however, it was stripped down acoustic renditions of songs that caught their imagination, rather than the electric versions, which always seemed inferior to the album recordings.

Actually, the unplugged scenario had been pretty much imposed on the band, there being no power at some of the locations. Four of the songs here ('Vaka', 'Samskeyti', 'agætis Byrjun' and 'Heysatan') were played acoustically on the road during the summer tour, with the remaining 'Staralfur' and 'Von', being first interpreted for a protest concert against a planned road development next to the band’s studio in the artistic community of Alafoss, back in February 2007.

'Heim' means "home".

Hvarf-Heim

‘Hvarf-Heim’ has two titles because it is in effect two separate, but complementary, entities, with two front covers and a limited run of two discs. Open it one way and it’s ‘Hvarf’ ("disappeared" or "haven"), a five track electric studio record comprising mainly unreleased rarities from Sigur Ros’s back-pages, none of which is on ‘Heima’. Open it the other way and it’s ‘Heim’ ("home"), a six track live acoustic record, comprising delicate new unplugged versions of some of Sigur Ros’s best moments, which have never been performed before.

Hvarf

The five tracks that make up 'Hvarf' are new recordings of songs taken from various points in Sigur Ros’s history. Three of them have never been released on record before, either because they were not recorded in the first place, or because they were recorded and then not included on a finished album. The other songs, 'Von' and 'Hafsol' are radical reworkings of songs from the band’s first (pre-Kjartan, pre-Orri) album.

'Hvarf' (say "kvarf") means "disappeared", which is what almost happened to this material… On the other hand, it also means "haven", which links it into 'Heim'...

malind / Staralfur

This limited 7" vinyl / download single, is released in October ahead of the ‘Hvarf-Heim’ album from which both tracks are taken.

‘Hljomalind‘, originally known as ‘Rokklagiô’ (‘The Rock Song’) until the band had to come up with a proper title for this release, has taken on some sort of legendary status among Sigur Ros fans, maybe the NME review goes some way towards explaining why: "There is no argument. Sigur Ros make the greatest atmospheric music ever. ‘Hljomalind‘ is a deeply emotional track that soars into the sky...".

‘Staralfur’ is one of those Sigur Ros songs that everyone just loves, but for the longest time they didn’t play live. To hear it played at all is something special. To hear it played acoustically is something that only very few people have had the pleasure of - until now. This recording was made live on the floor of the band’s studio for the ‘Heima‘ film.

More Background On Communications-News.com

HeimaFilm.com was created as the online home for Heima, the acclaimed documentary and concert film built around Icelandic band Sigur Rós and its remarkable series of free performances across Iceland. Released in 2007, the film is much more than a conventional record of a band onstage. It combines live performances, documentary footage, interviews, landscapes, small communities and Icelandic cultural traditions into a meditation on music, place and the meaning of returning home.

The title itself provides the key to understanding the project. Heima can be translated from Icelandic as “at home” or “homeland.” Rather than filming another concert during the international touring cycle for the band’s successful Takk... album, Sigur Rós returned to Iceland after traveling extensively around the world and staged a series of concerts during the summer of 2006. Many were free, some were largely unannounced, and several took place far outside anything resembling a conventional music venue.

HeimaFilm.com supported the film with background material, production notes, release information, news about screenings and information about the companion Hvarf-Heim recording. The site explained the central concept succinctly: the project was intended to document a tour encompassing both the largest and smallest performances of the band's career and to show Sigur Rós performing within the environment from which its music emerged.

That concept proved unusually durable. Nearly two decades after its original release, Heima retains a strong reputation among Sigur Rós fans, music-film enthusiasts and viewers interested in Iceland. The film currently holds a 90% critics score and 96% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 10 critic reviews and more than 2,500 audience ratings. It also remains officially available digitally through Sigur Rós.

The Band Behind Heima

Sigur Rós formed in Reykjavík in the 1990s and developed an international audience with music that resisted easy categorization. Frequently described as post-rock, ambient rock or art rock, the group became known for expansive compositions, Jónsi Birgisson's distinctive falsetto and bowed guitar, and arrangements that could move from near silence to enormous crescendos.

By the time of Heima, the group consisted of Jónsi, Georg Hólm, Kjartan Sveinsson and Orri Páll Dýrason, frequently accompanied in performances by the Icelandic string quartet Amiina.

The band's international profile had grown substantially through albums including Ágætis byrjun, ( ) and Takk.... The last of these, released in 2005, produced some of Sigur Rós's most recognizable music, including “Hoppípolla.”

The international success created an interesting problem. After spending so much time performing around the world, the musicians had comparatively little recent experience touring their own sparsely populated country.

Returning to Iceland consequently became more than an ordinary tour itinerary. It offered an opportunity to reconnect the internationally successful version of Sigur Rós with the country and communities from which the group had emerged.

The 2006 Tour Around Iceland

The performances that became Heima took place during the summer of 2006, following the long international Takk... touring cycle. Instead of simply returning to Reykjavík for one homecoming concert, the band traveled around Iceland.

Locations associated with the tour and film included Reykjavík, Ásbyrgi, Ólafsvík, Ísafjörður, Djúpavík, Öxnadalur, Seyðisfjörður and the Snæfell area.

The variety was deliberate.

One moment could involve thousands of people assembled outdoors; another might place the musicians in an abandoned industrial building or remote landscape. There were community halls, fields and places that barely qualified as venues at all.

One particularly memorable location was Djúpavík in Iceland's remote Westfjords. Once associated with the herring industry, its abandoned factory provided a setting unlike virtually anything encountered on a normal concert tour. Jónsi performed “Gítardjamm” inside one of the enormous old herring-oil tanks.

The band also traveled to a protest camp near Snæfell connected with opposition to a major dam development. There, circumstances helped push Sigur Rós toward acoustic performance. Georg Hólm later told Pitchfork that the group had never really approached its music that way before. Removing the production, amplification and reverb exposed the underlying songs and ultimately influenced the Heim portion of the companion album.

From Tiny Gatherings to 25,000 People

The extraordinary difference in scale between the performances became one of Heima's defining characteristics.

At one extreme was the Snæfell protest camp. At the other was the Reykjavík homecoming concert, which attracted approximately 25,000 people and was described by the filmmakers as the largest show ever staged in Iceland at that time.

In between were gatherings where local people sometimes learned of the performance primarily through word of mouth.

That mattered because the concerts weren't limited to established Sigur Rós fans. Free admission and unconventional locations brought in families, older residents, children and people who might never have purchased tickets for one of the band's regular concerts.

The filmmakers later recalled that the tour acquired a nearly mythical quality as it moved around Iceland. The newspaper Morgunblaðið characterized it as a gift that was helping bring the country together.

The resulting footage gives Heima an unusual social dimension. The audience isn't simply a cheering mass photographed from the stage. Viewers see individual faces, children, older Icelanders and communities reacting to the arrival of a globally successful group in places that international touring acts ordinarily bypass.

Iceland Is the Film's Other Main Character

Many reviews of Heima reached essentially the same conclusion: Iceland is as important to the film as Sigur Rós.

The filmmakers were conscious of the danger of turning the project into a succession of picturesque tourism images. Iceland's volcanoes, waterfalls, glaciers and geothermal landscapes were already internationally recognizable visual clichés.

The production therefore sought something more intimate and sometimes harsher.

The landscape is beautiful, but it can also appear immense, empty and indifferent to human presence. The filmmakers cited Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout as one influence on their treatment of environment. They also looked to Jazz on a Summer's Day and Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii when considering how music, close-up photography, audiences and unusual settings could coexist within a concert film.

The approach was noticed by critics. The Los Angeles Times described Heima as closer to an art-house movie than a standard concert rockumentary, noting its lingering attention to fjords and basalt landscapes. Time Out similarly observed that Iceland's natural beauty functions almost as another star of the production.

This connection between sound and landscape has become one of Heima's most culturally significant features. Sigur Rós had long been described by international journalists through metaphors involving Icelandic glaciers, volcanoes and isolation. Heima simultaneously acknowledges that association and makes it more complicated. Instead of merely suggesting that the music “sounds Icelandic,” the film puts the musicians among actual Icelandic people, buildings, abandoned industries, environmental controversies and everyday communities.

How the Film Was Made

The production was considerably more ambitious than pointing cameras at a few concerts.

The project evolved over several years. An early idea involved staging a show at Ásbyrgi, the spectacular horseshoe-shaped canyon in northern Iceland. A reconnaissance trip was made in 2004 to investigate summer light levels and determine how a performance might work there.

Iceland's extremely long midsummer daylight created a cinematographic problem: there would be too much light for the band's normal stage lighting and visuals to have their intended effect. The concept therefore shifted toward later summer.

Scheduling surrounding Takk... delayed the project further, and eventually the filmmakers decided to shoot at the end of the band's touring cycle in 2006.

The idea continued expanding. What might have been a concert film became an expedition involving dozens of people and numerous locations around the country. The production notes describe more than 40 people traveling to some of Iceland's most remote areas.

The music was recorded live without overdubs. Birgir Jón Birgisson, engineer at the band's Álafoss studio, and producer-engineer Ken Thomas handled the recordings. The movie was filmed in high definition and mixed in Dolby 5.1, with postproduction taking place in London and Los Angeles.

The Creative Problem That Changed Heima

Perhaps the most interesting part of Heima's production history is that the original material didn't initially work as a movie.

The 2006 filming generated roughly 120 hours of footage. Denni Karlsson began editing it, but the filmmakers eventually concluded that they had beautiful performances without enough narrative structure connecting them.

That realization brought Dean DeBlois into the project.

DeBlois was already known for co-writing and co-directing Disney's Oscar-nominated Lilo & Stitch. More importantly for Heima, he was a genuine Sigur Rós fan. After being shown the enormous quantity of existing footage, he studied the material and the band's tour diary and proposed what was missing.

In spring 2007, DeBlois returned to Iceland with the group and shot additional performances, environmental footage and interviews.

The interviews were particularly important because Sigur Rós had a reputation for being uncomfortable with conventional media appearances. Rather than turning Heima into a talking-head documentary, DeBlois used the conversations sparingly to create connective tissue between music, landscape and travel.

He also supplied the title.

Before Heima, the troubled project had been jokingly called Lost in the Lava. “Heima” immediately expressed what the filmmakers had been trying to make all along.

English editor Nick Fenton was another important addition. Working with the material without immersing himself in the unsuccessful earlier cuts, Fenton helped discover the rhythms and thematic connections that transformed the mass of footage into a coherent film. The production account credits the tension between DeBlois's more accessible cinematic instincts and Fenton's experimental approach with shaping the finished work.

What Viewers Hear in Heima

The film draws on multiple periods of Sigur Rós's career rather than functioning as a filmed version of Takk....

The official current Sigur Rós listing includes performances of “Glósóli,” “Sé lest,” “Ágætis byrjun,” “Heysátan,” “Olsen olsen,” “Von,” “Gítardjamm,” “Vaka,” “Á ferð til Breiðafjarðar vorið 1922,” “Starálfur,” “Hoppípolla,” “Popplagið” and “Samskeyti.”

Some familiar material is dramatically transformed.

That was crucial to the project's appeal. Fans weren't simply receiving live reproductions of studio recordings. The unusual environments and acoustic performances forced the band to reconsider its own material.

The movie also brings Icelandic musical traditions into the Sigur Rós world. Poet and traditional singer Steindór Andersen appears in connection with “Á ferð til Breiðafjarðar vorið 1922,” while other sequences place contemporary experimental rock alongside older cultural practices.

Hvarf-Heim and the Larger Heima Project

The movie was accompanied by Hvarf-Heim, a two-part musical release designed as a complement rather than a straightforward soundtrack.

Hvarf collected mostly previously unreleased or substantially reworked electric material. Heim presented live acoustic versions of established songs.

The distinction reflected what the musicians themselves discovered during the film project. A conventional live album seemed less interesting than documenting the stripped-down arrangements produced by the Iceland tour.

The pairing gave the overall Heima project several dimensions: the feature film, additional performance footage, physical DVD editions, photography and the companion recordings.

The special-edition DVD was particularly elaborate, including two discs and a 104-page book of photographs. The first disc contained the feature with surround and stereo audio options, while the second expanded the experience with complete performances and other supplementary material.

Release, Festivals and International Audience

Heima premiered in Iceland on September 27, 2007, associated with the Reykjavík International Film Festival, before expanding through international festival screenings and theatrical engagements.

The original website publicized screenings across Europe and Asia, including appearances connected with the Irish Film Institute, Stockholm Film Festival, Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival and Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

The film opened theatrically in the United Kingdom in November 2007, with DVD releases following internationally. Sigur Rós's official site announced the worldwide release for November 5, with the North American edition arriving November 20.

Its audience extended well beyond established fans. The combination of landscape photography, travelogue, documentary filmmaking and atmospheric music made Heima accessible to viewers interested in Iceland even if they knew relatively little about Sigur Rós.

That crossover appeal is one reason the film has aged better than many tour DVDs from the same period. It is attached to a specific band and moment, but it isn't dependent on knowledge of that moment.

Reviews and Critical Reception

Critical response was strongly positive overall.

Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian wrote that he was “utterly captivated,” particularly admiring the relationship among the band, Icelandic communities and the country's landscape. Another Guardian review by Philip French described the documentary as visually and aurally delightful and compared it favorably with the classic concert film Jazz on a Summer's Day.

Time Out awarded it four out of five stars, emphasizing the unusual intensity of the experience and noting how successfully the local production crew photographed Iceland.

The band's own contemporary roundup cited five-star notices from Q and Total Film, four-star reviews from Empire, The Guardian, The Times and Time Out, and the Los Angeles Times' description of it as more art-house film than ordinary rock documentary.

Not every reaction was unqualified. Some critics found its pacing slow or its aesthetic excessively reverential. That response is understandable because Heima deliberately avoids many of the mechanisms conventional music documentaries use to maintain momentum. There is little backstage conflict, celebrity spectacle or dramatic narration.

For viewers receptive to its pace, however, that restraint is precisely the point.

Rotten Tomatoes' current figures — 90% among critics and 96% among audiences — suggest that its reputation has remained unusually strong.

Awards and Recognition

Heima also received formal recognition within Icelandic film culture.

At Iceland's 2007 Edda Awards, the film received nominations for Documentary of the Year, Best Cinematography and Editing, and Best Sound or Music. Birgir Jón Birgisson and Ken Thomas were recognized in connection with the sound and music nomination.

The film later won the Audience Award at Hungary's Titanic International Film Festival in 2008.

These honors are significant because Heima occupies an unusual position between categories. It is simultaneously a concert movie, music documentary, landscape film and cultural portrait. Its Edda nominations recognized that the achievement extended beyond the music itself into cinematography, editing, sound and documentary filmmaking.

Popularity and Lasting Reputation

Heima was never designed as a conventional blockbuster film. Its popularity is better measured through longevity and enthusiasm within several overlapping audiences.

For Sigur Rós fans, it became one of the defining documents of the band's career. For music-film enthusiasts, it offered an alternative to the fast-cutting, backstage-access model of the standard rock documentary. For viewers fascinated by Iceland, it became an unexpectedly powerful visual introduction to the country.

The companion Hvarf-Heim release also performed respectably internationally, reaching No. 2 in Iceland and charting in the United Kingdom and numerous European markets.

More tellingly, Heima remains part of Sigur Rós's official catalog today. The band's website continues to maintain a dedicated film page, while a digital edition remains available globally.

That continued availability separates Heima from many music DVDs of the 2000s that effectively disappeared as physical-media consumption declined.

The Cultural and Social Significance of Heima

One of the film's most interesting achievements is the way it reverses the normal relationship between an internationally successful musician and a hometown audience.

A homecoming concert ordinarily means returning to a major arena, celebrating success and performing for fans who already know the music. Sigur Rós instead took its international success outward into Iceland, including places rarely visited by major touring acts.

The free-admission policy strengthened that idea.

The result became something closer to a traveling cultural event than an ordinary tour. Residents didn't necessarily have to identify themselves as Sigur Rós fans. They could simply walk over and see what was happening.

That created some of the film's most enduring images: children watching intently, families gathered outdoors, elderly residents sharing spaces with younger fans, and musicians playing against locations carrying their own histories.

Environmental concerns also appear beneath the surface. The Snæfell performance took place against the background of controversy surrounding hydroelectric development and the transformation of Iceland's wilderness. Some contemporary reviewers consequently interpreted Heima not simply as beautiful landscape photography but as a record of landscapes facing change.

This gives the movie a subtle historical quality that has become more apparent with time.

What HeimaFilm.com Represented

HeimaFilm.com belonged to a particular period in internet and entertainment history when a dedicated movie website was an important part of a film's identity.

Rather than functioning merely as an advertisement directing visitors to purchase tickets, the site provided context: an introduction to the film, production notes, news, screening information, details about Hvarf-Heim and explanations of the ideas behind the project.

Its production notes were especially valuable because they explained the unusual evolution from tour footage into a genuine feature documentary. They documented the early Ásbyrgi idea, the logistical complexity of traveling around Iceland, the difficulties with the first edit and the later involvement of DeBlois and Fenton.

In that sense, the website served both promotional and archival purposes.

Today, the official Sigur Rós website performs much of that archival function, preserving extensive information about the movie and offering the digital edition. The continued existence of HeimaFilm.com as a recognizable title also reflects the enduring interest in a film that became far more significant than an ordinary promotional tour DVD.

Why Heima Still Matters

The simplest explanation for Heima's longevity is that the filmmakers understood they were documenting something larger than a series of concerts.

Sigur Rós could have made a technically excellent film of its international stage production. Instead, the band dismantled much of what normally surrounded it and returned to Iceland.

The process changed the music. It forced acoustic experimentation. It connected internationally successful musicians with small communities. It documented industrial ruins and wilderness alongside enormous crowds. And it gave audiences outside Iceland a portrait of the country that avoided functioning solely as tourism advertising.

Dean DeBlois and the filmmaking team then transformed those elements into something with its own cinematic identity.

The result is why Heima continues to attract people who have never seen Sigur Rós in concert and, in some cases, may not initially consider themselves fans.

It is a concert film in which the concerts are only part of the story.

It is a travel film in which travel is not really the subject.

And it is a film about Iceland that ultimately concerns the complicated emotional idea contained in its one-word title: what it means to come home.