‘The Day Iceland Stood Still’ Sells to Spain and Japan as Director Talks Empowerment of 1970s Feminist Strike: ‘Ordinary Women Did This Extraordinary Thing’ (EXCLUSIVE)

Emmy award-winning U.S. filmmaker Pamela Hogan’s doc “The Day Iceland Stood Still” has been acquired by Spanish public broadcaster RTVE and Japanese public broadcaster NHK, with a German release scheduled for spring 2025.

“The sales are starting off really great. It’s so rewarding to see how this film resonates as a source of inspiration for broad audiences,” said Stefan Kloos, managing director of Rise and Shine World Sales.

A co-production between Iceland and the U.S. – produced by Hrafnhildur Gunnarsdóttir and shown at Ji.hlava Film Festival in the Testimonies section this week – it focuses on a moment in 1975 when many women in Iceland decided to take a “day off,” calling for equal pay and equal rights, effectively paralyzing the whole country.

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“Part of it had to do with: ‘Let’s make the world know that these ordinary women did this extraordinary thing.’ Women’s stories aren’t usually told, but it can empower all of us,” Hogan told Variety.

“My mom was a feminist at the same time when they started their [Red Stockings] movement. I watched how hard she fought and how angry she was that women were being paid half as much as the men. Then it just… stopped. In Iceland, they kept on going. They had a female president [Vigdís Finnbogadóttir], they started a female political movement. Today, [Iceland] requires employers to pay women and men the same and to prove it.”

Still, at the time, some decided to sit the strike out.

“Maybe they bought into the propaganda that they were better off this way? That men should take care of you, even though it’s not always the case?,” wondered Hogan, surprised by the humor of Icelandic activists, not afraid of bringing a cow to a beauty contest or nailing a dummy of an exhausted housewife to a Christmas tree just to make their point.

“I teach at Columbia and I always tell my students: ‘Let the film be what it is. Listen to what the people are telling you.’ I had no idea they used humor this way, to weaponize the message of their movement and to support each other. Then I went: ‘Oh my gosh, this is going to be so much fun,’” she laughed.

“One of them told me: ‘We gave people new ears, so they could listen to what we were saying.’ Otherwise, it would just be a fight that nobody wins. And they wanted to win. There are lessons there for all of us in other countries. We went to South Korea with the film and the women there were literally taking notes.”

As an American, she never set out to make a film in Iceland. But she didn’t really have a choice.

“I went to see Werner Herzog who was giving a speech. He said: ‘Sometimes, a story is like a burglar that breaks into your house and chases you around.’ That’s how I felt.”

She found out about the strike in the Lonely Planet guidebook on vacation with her family back in 2015.

“I got so excited I couldn’t even breathe. I was sure someone had made a film about it and spent a few hours looking for it online. But nobody did! When I went back to the States, apparently I couldn’t stop talking about it.”

She joined forces with Gunnarsdóttir, spending the next seven years “looking for interesting stories.”

“Everyone told me that if you want your film to get distribution, it has to be about one person or two. But the whole point of the movement was that everybody was equal. It was different in the U.S.: we had Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug. We had leaders. I realized I needed to have a Greek chorus.”

In “The Day Iceland Stood Still,” Red Stockings members open up about their struggles, family lives and finding strength in communities.

“All these ‘sewing groups’? They weren’t sewing there. It was an excuse to gather during these dark months. It shows you how wise they were. They knew they were doing something big and they had these headquarters where they would go and talk. Coffee and cigarettes really fed that movement.”

In animated parts of the doc, overseen by Joel Orloff, they talk about being told, over and over again, they won’t be able to realize their dreams because of their gender.

“I’ve never worked with animation before. In my early proposals, I was using all these black and white photographs. It looked like a Ken Burns documentary, something you would watch for a class. I thought: ‘I want this to be watched by young people. It’s not just for the history books,’” Hogan said.

“The women didn’t really have cameras back then – one of them had a Super8 and we used every bit of that footage. But when they would tell me stories about wanting to be a captain and people telling them they can’t, I wondered: ‘How did it make you feel?’ Animation can bring back these feelings.”

Although she came to Iceland as a foreigner, she ended up making a personal film.

“I was working with all these Icelanders and at one point, they said to me: ‘You know you are making this for your mother, right?’ When I was in high school, I was so embarrassed [of her activism]. Now, I am so grateful,” she noted.

“In Iceland, they know that if you don’t remember the past, you might go back to it. Look at what’s going on in the U.S. – we lost our reproductive rights as a matter of national legislation. It’s a dark moment, but I see changes in Spain or in Poland, where women have joined hands and held very effective demonstrations. There is a lot of power in being inspired by each other.”