THE GROUND BENEATH OUR FEET

Iceland, Poland | 2025 | 82 min | col. | Icelandic

The seasons pass by outside the windows of the Grund nursing home in Reykjavik. The daily routines of its almost centenarian guests are reiterated, while every day the little rituals they perform gradually become more uncertain. Irony comes to the surface, with a laugh to exorcise the time that goes by. To the rhythm of persistent feelings and waning memories, the film immerses us in a community that confronts death closely, considering it as a natural phenomenon, a counter-trend compared with society, where it is often repressed. The sensitive texture of the 16mm footage looks at the bodies with a gaze pervaded by tenderness: they appear like landscapes of increasingly fragile life, which flows tenuously and pulses with stories and desires. A constellation of loving gestures articulates the film, accompanying the fading of memories and presences. Like a faint dance, the film’s light movement takes us through the rarefied tension toward an other time to flow into a sleep, a dream, a last passage. (M.M.)