Driving Mum

About

Dir: Hilmar Oddsson
2022 Estonia/Iceland 113’
Þröstur Leó Gunnarsson, Kristbjörg Kjeld, Hera Hilmar
Icelandic with English Subtitles

Hilmar Oddsson’s darkly comedic road movie is a bewitching 1980-set odyssey of self-discovery and acceptance across the beautifully photographed landscapes of Iceland.

Middle-aged and disappointed, Jón spends his days knitting and listening to the radio with his domineering elderly mother on their rural Icelandic farmstead.

With his life overtaken with looking after his home and his mother’s needs, Jón’s isolated world is upended when she suddenly passes away. But having left him a series of instructions to follow upon her death, Jón sets out on a journey across Iceland to honour her final wishes – including being buried in Eyrarbakki, her home village.

Strapping her into his Ford Cortina, and with the beloved (and scene-stealing) family dog Brezhnev in tow, Jón sets off on his strange odyssey. With his late mum still relentlessly nagging him from the back seat, he meets a variety of peculiar and charming strangers en route, and encounters some ghosts from his past too…

Beautifully filmed in crisp black and white, Driving Mum is a heartwarming, emotional film with a fantastic central performance from Gunnarsson.

WINNER, Grand Prix, Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival 2022

WINNER, Best Original Score, Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival 2022

‘Oddson maintains a melancholy mood and finds ways to shift his narrative from everyday absurdity to full-on surreality and back again.’ Amber Wilkinson, Eye for Film

‘Strange at times but at the heart a tender story of discovery.’ Katie Hogan, FILMHOUNDS Magazine