Star Guest Rúnar Rúnarsson’s Retrospective Inspires the Visual Look of Tampere Film Festival 2026

The next programme highlight to be announced for Tampere Film Festival 2026 is a retrospective dedicated to star guest Rúnar Rúnarsson. Rúnarsson is an Icelandic film director and the founder of the film company HALIBUT, whose films have received international recognition for over two decades. Rúnarsson will be present at the festival in connection with screenings.

The retrospective screening presents four fictional short films from different stages of Rúnarsson’s career. The programme opens with the Oscar®-nominated Síðasti bærinn (The Last Farm, Iceland, 2004), which takes the viewer to a remote valley where only one farm remains. The second film, Smáfuglar (2 Birds, Iceland, 2008), which won numerous Best Short Film awards at film festivals, depicts young people’s journey from innocence to adulthood over the course of a single summer night.

Produced in Denmark, Anna (Denmark, 2009) tells the story of a 12-year-old girl from a fishing village whose surroundings and sense of self are changing. The final film in the programme is O (Iceland, Sweden, 2024), winner of the Audience Award in the International Competition at Tampere Film Festival 2025. The film is described as a humanistic and poetic story about a fragile man whose main obstacle lies within himself.

– The grey scale of life is a vital element of my filmmaking. Everything is multilayered or has different and often opposite emotions and perspectives on it. The moments in life that are black or white are few: we spend our lives travelling on the spectrum between the two, Rúnarsson says of his films.

In addition to the short film screening, audiences will also see Rúnarsson’s feature-length fiction film Bergmál (Echo, Iceland, 2019) on the big screen. The internationally awarded film (e.g. the Main Prize for Feature Films at the Golden Raven International Arctic Film Festival and Best Director Award at the Seminci International Film Festival) draws a portrait, both bitter and tender, of modern society through 56 scenes.

New Design Reflects the Nature of Iceland

The starting point for the visual design of Tampere Film Festival 2026 was Rúnar Rúnarsson’s home country Iceland, its dramatic nature, and especially water in its many forms of motion. The visual identity has been designed by the festival’s graphic designer Heini Puurtinen, and the original finger logo is by Kimmo Kaivanto.

– The orange, foaming shapes reflect Iceland’s many waterfalls and their roaring power. The yellow elements depict water’s constant, inexhaustible movement and its eternal flow. The hands resting on the water’s surface and the ripples they create refer to another, deeper force: the seismic tremors of Iceland’s volcanoes and their continuous, often imperceptible vibration. I wanted to bring all of this together in a visual world that is colourful, light and harmonious, yet at the same time striking, Puurtinen describes the thinking behind the visual identity.

Effects similar to the movement of water or earthquakes can also, at their best, be found in the relationship between film and its environment:

– Interpretations of powerful themes can burst forth forcefully, flowing and roaring, and affect us for a long time. At other times, the experience barely breaks the surface tension, creating a quiet, almost imperceptible movement that shimmers on the surface, Puurtinen reflects.