From Hetty to Nancy

Travel journal entries weave a narrative that counterpoises the austere Icelandic ‘frontier' landscape with the banalities of travel circumstances. The stoic beauty the Icelandic landscape forms a backdrop for a series of witty and caustic letters written at the turn of the century by a woman named Hetty as she treks with her companion Masie, four school girls and their school marm. The film juxtaposes Hetty's ironic cataloguing of the petty social interactions of her companions as they endure discomfort and boredom with historic accounts of catastrophes that reveal the Icelandic people subject to the awesome forces of nature.