Tiny Icelandic town pins its hopes on the Oscars
• Hit hard by Covid-19, Husavik hopes a spoof musical and an Academy Award nomination could spur recovery
The winter storms had passed and the snowy mountains across the bay sparkled in the sunshine, but there were few people around to enjoy the spectacle, and certainly no tourists.
Iceland’s tourism boom has been brought to an abrupt standstill by the pandemic — in the final quarter of 2020, visitor numbers were down 96% on the previous year. For places like Husavik, where a third of jobs directly depend on holidaymakers, the effect has been severe and, at times, the outlook bleak. And yet, against the odds, the town has a spring in its step and a possible saviour from the unlikeliest of places: Hollywood.
Husavik, home to 2,300 people, 70,000 puffins and a whale museum, is up for an Oscar. Technically, the award contender is not the town but a song of the same name, from the soundtrack of a slapstick Will Ferrell comedy about the Eurovision Song Contest, but the residents have set up their own “Oscar for Husavik” campaign, complete with a video showing a rendition by local schoolchildren and a fisherman on the dock kissing a cod as if it were a golden statuette.
Already on the shortlist of 15 for Best Original Song, Husavik (My Hometown) is tipped to be among the five nominees to be announced next week. That would mean the song — extolling the town’s mountains, whales and seagulls, and sung partly in Icelandic — being performed at the Oscars ceremony in front of a global audience of hundreds of millions.
For a hardscrabble town sandwiched between the frigid Greenland Sea and hundreds of kilometres of volcanic wilderness, it is a potentially seminal moment. “I don’t know if any town has ever been so lucky,” says Orlygur Hnefill Orlygsson, owner of the Cape Hotel and a former president of the town council.
“Of course, there are big tunes for big cities, but this is a tiny town and we get this beautiful song written about us.”
The film, Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga, was released in June 2020, in a week in which more than 100 residents had lost their jobs in tourism. “That was the highest number that have ever lost their job in Husavik, so this was a very black day for the community,” says Orlygsson.
“But at the end of the same week they released this film and it just lifted everyone’s spirits.”
“I was taking a midnight stroll and you could hear every other house was playing the movie,” says Hinrik Wöhler, MD of Husavikurstofa, the local tourism promotion agency. The town’s profile soared overnight — the Visit Husavik website saw traffic rise fivefold in the first week, and tenfold the week after. Soon Wöhler was being contacted on social media by people sending cover versions from around the world, including a televised talent show in South Korea.
I WAS TAKING A MIDNIGHT STROLL AND YOU COULD HEAR EVERY OTHER HOUSE WAS PLAYING THE MOVIE
Hitting the tourism promotion jackpot seems to have been random good luck. Ferrell says he became aware of Eurovision after happening to see it while visiting his future wife’s family in Sweden. He quickly realised the comedy potential in the glitzy, highcamp singing competition but chose Iceland as a location rather than Sweden so the protagonists could be underdogs from a nation that had never won. It was cowriter Andrew Steele who alighted on Husavik. “He just found it on the map,” Ferrell told Icelandic magazine Stopover — presumably deciding the name would be easier for the lyricists than alternatives such as Skagafjordur, Siglufjordur or Hofn (pronounced like a hiccup).
The film, produced by Netflix, follows Lars Erickssong and Sigrit Ericksdottir (Ferrell and Rachel McAdams), a deluded double act who take their songs and ambitions seriously but are stuck playing the local bar where the only music anyone wants to hear is their goofy oompah-and-accordion tune Jaja Ding Dong. After an explosion wipes out the rest of Iceland’s contenders, they find themselves getting their longedfor shot at Eurovision, helped by some unseen elves. The cast, also including Pierce Brosnan, spent a week filming in Husavik in October 2019 with many of the locals as extras.
But if the film’s release gave the initial boost to the town’s spirits, there must have been fears that the golden opportunity was slipping through their fingers. A planned premiere in Husavik was cancelled because of the pandemic. Worse, the 2020 Eurovision Song Contest — the event that should have boosted the film, especially given that the real-life favourite was from Iceland — was itself cancelled for the first time in 64 years.
And then the reviews were dire. Variety called it “a badly shot one-joke movie that sits there and goes thud”; Empire concluded: “This muddled misfire is closer to nil points than the coveted douze.” Meanwhile, with Covid-19 lockdowns making it impossible to convert online interest to real tourist traffic, Husavik’s moment seemed to be passing.
But if the film itself doesn’t shine, the songs seem to have taken on a life of their own. Husavik (My Hometown) reached number eight in the Australian charts, 15 in Canada, and two in Iceland. An album of the movie’s music became the fifth best-selling soundtrack in the US and has been nominated for a Grammy. And then, in February, came news of the Oscar shortlisting.
The timing seems perfect — the publicity coming alongside growing excitement about the resumption of travel later in the year. “There’s a month and a half between the nominations and the Oscars ceremony, so it’s a long time for the song to be in the spotlight,” says Orlygsson.
“And given the name of the song is the same as the name of the town … I mean, this couldn’t have been written more perfectly for us, to be honest.”
The result is that rather than sitting on their hands waiting out the pandemic, Husavik’s residents are working hard to make the most of their brush with the Academy Awards.
“Almost all the tourism businesses here are small local companies, and everyone is doing something — painting their buildings, extending or changing their layouts,” says Orlygsson.
“That tells me people are positive and optimistic that things will get better soon, and I think the film plays quite a role in that.”
And if there’s a certain circularity about the climactic finale from a movie about a song contest actually making it to the final stages of a real competition, in Husavik, life is imitating art even more literally. For the film, a subs bench from the local football club was brought to the dockside to double as a bus stop for several key scenes. Now there are moves to permanently move the bench to recreate the bus stop for real.
“The football club is not that happy … but we just need to find some deal,” says Wöhler.
Tourists who make it to the town in the northern hemisphere summer will also find walking tours of the locations, a recreation of the elf houses and the Jaja Ding Dong bar at the Cape Hotel. Meanwhile, Orlygsson is converting a former warehouse to become a Eurovision museum, featuring costumes from the movie as well as others from real-life Eurovision contenders — a scattering of sequins and stardust in a town usually devoted to Gore-Tex and fleece.
“Previously, eight out of 10 tourists came to go whale watching,” says Wöhler, “but I think now we have another image too — some kind of fairytale Eurovision town. So I think it’s going to be a good year.” /© The Financial Times 2021