Out of Thin Air Media Evaluation

Coverage Evaluation August 2017

tpr media consultants

Out of Thin Air Coverage Key Quotes

FINANCIAL TIMES: 'A tautly constructed documentary that combines all the thrills of Scandi noir with the frisson of reality.' ★★★★★

DAILY MAIL: 'A riveting real life story.' 'Documentary of the week' ★★★★ '

THE SUNDAY TIMES: 'A dreamy, drug-laced story of a youthquake in volcano country.'

THE TIMES: 'Fascinating twists and turns.'

MAIL ON SUNDAY: 'We're used to European crime dramas, but here the chilling story is all too real.'

DAILY TELEGRAPH: 'Gripping true crime documentary.'

THE GUARDIAN: 'The first-hand testimony...is especially harrowing.'

OBSERVER: 'Masterful.'

INDEPENDENT: 'Straight out of Scandi-noir.'

iNEWS: ‘Intriguing.’

RADIO TIMES: 'Superbly done.'

Out of Thin Air

Mosaic Films, BBC Storyville, August 2017, Netflix, September 2017 tpr media consultants were engaged from May to August 2017 by Mosaic Films to create and deliver a PR strategy for the documentary Out of Thin Air. We positioned the featurelength film as a compelling true crime story, a successor to Making a Murderer with stylish, Nordic Noir appeal. The campaign tied in with its broadcast on BBC Storyville in August and Netflix from September.

The first challenge was to make this story accessible in words and images. With the support of Mosaic Films, tpr media spent a lot of time researching the background to the case and creating a press pack and website which told the story, painting a picture of 1970s Iceland, the backstory of the contributors and an understanding of Memory Distrust Syndrome, a rare condition where people lose trust in their own memories. We felt this this was essential groundwork in helping an already overstretched media to understand the complex but fascinating case. We also focused on the stylised look and feel of the documentary and the trailer was very helpful here. Using these finely-tuned media materials as a starting point, we created different pitches for different outlets, carefully briefing contributors – especially Erla Bolladottir and Dr Gisli Gudjonsson – and the production team, who we were in regular contact with.

Knowing that Out of Thin Air would appeal to a younger-than-usual Storyville audience, we aimed for coverage in a broad range of outlets that included the Guardian, Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour and The World Tonight as well as Vice – where it was one of their most shared stories of the week – film website Little White Lies and the Huffington Post. BBC Newsnight were keen to cover the story but cancelled it twice due to a busy news agenda.

We had blanket previews, many four and five stars, from the Financial Times to the Observer. It was the Mail's documentary of the week. The listings magazines also lapped it up and Broadcastnow ran a behind-the-scenes feature written by the production team.

Overall there were 60 pieces of coverage with a total reach of 13.3million people. The total news value for the campaign was £404, 850.

Out of Thin Air Media Coverage Figures Total News Value:

404.85k Total News Reach:

13.38m Total Volume of Items:

59 Total Unique Sources:

46

UK Nationals Regionals

Internet

Irish Nationals

Top 20 Sources by Value

Source Name The Guardian.Com (Web)

Value 115,886.00

The Sunday Times

65,226.24

Yahoo! Uk And Ireland (Web)

27,668.00

Vice Uk (Web)

26,964.00

Huffington Post Uk (Blog)

24,510.00

The Sunday Telegraph

20,523.36

The Guardian

18,161.00

Irish Independent (Web)

13,605.00

Daily Mail

12,623.76

Radio Times

11,783.52

The Daily Telegraph

7,906.44

Financial Times

7,104.24

Top 20 Sources by Reach

Source Name

Article Reach

The Guardian.Com (Web)

2,158,706

Daily Mail

1,511,357

The Mail On Sunday

1,238,512

Yahoo! Uk And Ireland (Web)

1,030,766

Huffington Post Uk (Blog)

913,143

Evening Standard

878,290

The Sunday Times

792,324

Radio Times

668,526

Irish Independent (Web)

506,838

The Daily Telegraph

472,258

The Times

451,261

Daily Star

443,452

Out of Thin Air Radio

Erla Bolladottir, Clothes for zero gravity, Katharine Welby-Roberts Erla Bolladottir has been described as Iceland's most notorious woman. That's because of what she told police about a double-murder in the 1970s which led to 5 young men, including her boyfriend, being found guilty of the crimes. She was later jailed for perjury. But was there a miscarriage of justice, and did Erla experience "memory distrust syndrome", with her mind playing tricks on her? The police investigation was found to be deeply flawed, and the men's murder convictions could be reopened. Jane speaks to Erla and to journalist, Helga Arnardottir ahead of the BBC Documentary Out of Thin Air. Presenter: Jane Garvey Producer: Caroline Donne

BBC Radio 4, The World Tonight Thu 10 Aug 2017, 22:00 Interview with Professor Gisli Gudjonsson

BBC World Service, Newshour Thu 10 Aug 2017, 21:00

Out of Thin Air Features

UK Nationals Client: Source: Date:

TPR Media Yellow News The Guardian 07/08/2017

Keyword: Page: Reach: Size: Value:

Out of Thin Air 14 153163 869 12426.70

Coverage is reproduced under license from the NLA, CLA or other copyright owner. No further copying (including the +44 (0)20 7264 4700 printing of digital cuttings) digital reproductions or forwarding is permitted except under license from the NLA, services@KantarMedia.com http://www.nla.co.uk (for newspapers) CLA http://www.cla.co.uk (for books and magazines) or other copyright body. www.KantarMedia.com

UK Nationals Client: Source: Date:

TPR Media Yellow News The Guardian 07/08/2017

Keyword: Page: Reach: Size: Value:

Out of Thin Air 14 153163 869 12426.70

Coverage is reproduced under license from the NLA, CLA or other copyright owner. No further copying (including the +44 (0)20 7264 4700 printing of digital cuttings) digital reproductions or forwarding is permitted except under license from the NLA, services@KantarMedia.com http://www.nla.co.uk (for newspapers) CLA http://www.cla.co.uk (for books and magazines) or other copyright body. www.KantarMedia.com

UK Nationals Client: Source: Date:

TPR Media Yellow News The Guardian 07/08/2017

Keyword: Page: Reach: Size: Value:

Out of Thin Air 14 153163 869 12426.70

Coverage is reproduced under license from the NLA, CLA or other copyright owner. No further copying (including the +44 (0)20 7264 4700 printing of digital cuttings) digital reproductions or forwarding is permitted except under license from the NLA, services@KantarMedia.com http://www.nla.co.uk (for newspapers) CLA http://www.cla.co.uk (for books and magazines) or other copyright body. www.KantarMedia.com

UK Nationals Client: Source: Date:

TPR Media Yellow News The Guardian 07/08/2017

Keyword: Page: Reach: Size: Value:

Out of Thin Air 14 153163 869 12426.70

Coverage is reproduced under license from the NLA, CLA or other copyright owner. No further copying (including the +44 (0)20 7264 4700 printing of digital cuttings) digital reproductions or forwarding is permitted except under license from the NLA, services@KantarMedia.com http://www.nla.co.uk (for newspapers) CLA http://www.cla.co.uk (for books and magazines) or other copyright body. www.KantarMedia.com

UK Nationals Client: Source: Date:

TPR Media Yellow News The Guardian 07/08/2017

Keyword: Page: Reach: Size: Value:

Out of Thin Air 14 153163 869 12426.70

Coverage is reproduced under license from the NLA, CLA or other copyright owner. No further copying (including the +44 (0)20 7264 4700 printing of digital cuttings) digital reproductions or forwarding is permitted except under license from the NLA, services@KantarMedia.com http://www.nla.co.uk (for newspapers) CLA http://www.cla.co.uk (for books and magazines) or other copyright body. www.KantarMedia.com

TPR Media Yellow News The Source: Guardian.com Client:

View Online View Text PDF

Date: 04­Aug­2017 Reach: 2158706 Value: 57943

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'Deep down, I knew it didn't happen': The woman who imagined a murder When two men disappeared in 1974, Erla Bolladottir’s testimony put her boyfriend and his friends in prison for murder. She tells us how the case made her the most notorious woman in Iceland – and why they may be innocent after all

‘I just waited and waited for something to confirm for me that I didn’t imagine it’ … Erla Bolladottir. Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian

Paula Cocozza Friday 4 August 2017 15.46 BST

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I

n 1974, two men vanished in Iceland within the space of 10 months. The country’s population was only 220,000, small enough for people to feel they knew each other. Crime was scant. But neither man was found. There were no witnesses, no forensic evidence – no bodies. After an intensive police investigation, six young men confessed to their part in the murders.

Their confessions were spurred in part by the testimony of Erla Bolladottir, girlfriend of the group’s alleged ringleader, Sævar Ciesielski. Despite retracting their confessions, Ciesielski and four friends were convicted of murder; Bolladottir was convicted of perjury for attempting to implicate four other innocent men. The case, and Bolladottir’s name, remain notorious in Iceland – at the time of the trial, she says that Ciesielski was painted by the media as a Charles Manson figure, and her as one of his devoted Family members. But over the decades, horror at the supposed crimes has been replaced with fears that an atrocious miscarriage of justice occurred. Now, more than 40 years later, with the special prosecutor in Iceland recommending that the case be reopened, Bolladottir has turned chief witness in Out of Thin Air, a feature­length documentary for BBC Storyville.

The film, directed by Dylan Howitt, has a noirish feel, appropriately for a mystery which in Iceland is regarded as “a black hole”. But this is no whodunnit. The film raises many more questions than answers, and even talking to Bolladottir – during her visit to the UK to view the documentary – takes the story further into uncertainty.

Bolladottir’s part in the murder investigation began on 13 December 1975 when, aged 20, she was arrested for embezzlement. She confessed to the crime, which she had committed with Ciesielski. As the interview concluded she felt relieved to have got the story off her chest. She was also looking forward to going home; she and Ciesielski had an 11­week­old girl. But instead of letting her leave, the police officers threw her a question about Guðmundur Einarsson, the first of the two men to have gone missing 11 months earlier.

“I was really tired. I was trying to accommodate them, but I didn’t know anything,” Bolladottir says. She told the police about a nightmare she had had on the night of Einarsson’s disappearance. She dreamt that she lay in bed listening to voices outside the window. “They were whispering, ‘Is she awake? Is she asleep?’”

From those fragments, Bolladottir says, the police began to Erla Bolladottir in construct an alternate reality: “They tried to convince me that 1976. Photograph: this had not been a nightmare.” She was sent back to her cell, National Archive/BBC Four where over the next nine days, the questioning continued. “They really went into details. ‘Why was a bedsheet in the bin? Had it been used to wrap the body?’ I was trying to picture everything they told me.” At a certain point, the effort to visualise the details described by the police produced in her mind a picture that was vivid enough to seem real. Now the bedsheet, which hadn’t previously figured in Bolladottir’s dream, was not only imaginable but memorable too.

When the police asked, “Could it have been like this?” suddenly all things seemed possible. “I couldn’t deny that it could have been,” she says. “Somehow, between me and them, this story formed. And I never knew, did it come from me, or did it come from them?”

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It seems unthinkable that Bolladottir, on the basis of such unstable recollections, would provide the testimony that helped to convict her boyfriend and his friends of murder. At one point, she claimed that she herself had killed Geirfinnur Einarsson with a shotgun. At another, she implicated her half­brother Einar along with three other men, all of whom were held for 105 days before being released without charge. It is the instability of memory itself that Howitt investigates. The film has the Convicted … Sævar atmosphere of a thriller – it opens in darkness, a gun fires, snow Ciesielski in 1976.

Photograph: National falls, a door thunks shut on a green cell. And the softly spoken Archive/BBC Four Bolladottir, reliving it all with undisguised bewilderment, is the ultimate unreliable narrator. Even now, she finds it hard to know what she knew.

How much does she really remember of that night? She knows that she had the nightmare; and that she never had it again. And that the mental pictures of the murder have stayed in her head, “as if it happened, you know? But it didn’t happen.” She now views these images as symptomatic of memory distrust syndrome, a condition originally identified

by Gísli Guðjónsson, a professor of forensic psychology whose expert testimony helped overturn the convictions of the Birmingham Six and Guildford Four.

Central to the case is the amount of time Bolladottir, Ciesielski and his associates spent in solitary confinement. One of the group, Tryggvi Rúnar Leifsson, spent 655 days in solitary, the longest recorded stint outside Guantánamo Bay, while Bolladottir herself spent 135 days alone. All had infrequent access to lawyers. “It’s almost like you’re a split personality,” she says. “Deep down I knew it didn’t happen. But somehow I wasn’t sure at the same time.”

“Time is so difficult to talk about [in detention]. It’s all just one big universal time,” she says. She became so distrusting of her own memory that she began to doubt she had even given birth. “I tried to see my daughter’s face, and I couldn’t see it. I didn’t want to ask anybody.” She was scared if she did that she would never see her daughter again.

“I just waited and waited for something to confirm for me that I didn’t imagine it.”

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‘Somehow, between me and the police, a story formed’ … a reconstruction of the crime scene. Photograph: National Archive/BBC Four

These days Bolladottir works as a project manager for an adult education centre that helps immigrants integrate in Reykjavik. But it took decades to integrate herself. “There was no life for me in the community,” she says. People spat at her on the street. She struggled to find work. She lived for a while in Hawaii, with her sister, then after getting married she spent a few years in South Africa. She had two more daughters, now aged 27 and 21.

When Bolladottir came back to Iceland in 1998, Ciesielski had been out of prison for more than a decade, fighting to clear his name. He had become homeless, and alcoholic, but before his death in 2011, the two managed to talk. So did Bolladottir apologise to Ciesielski for her part in his conviction?

“I did, I did,” she says. “For a long time, no matter how drunk he was, that man … would come to my house and I couldn’t take him inside because I had a family there. So we had an arrangement. He would ring the bell and I would go down to where we kept the bicycles. We had total peace there. We would just sit on the floor and talk for hours.”

It was during these conversations, she says, that she “came out of all uncertainty” about his innocence.

She is crying now. Life “never went back to normal”, she says. Nor can it. Julia, her eldest daughter, is now 41 and, Bolladottir says, in touch with her half­siblings, Ciesielski’s other children, who are also hoping to prove their father’s innocence.

But even if Ciesielski’s conviction is overturned, along with that of his friends, Bolladottir will not be found innocent. Her own perjury conviction is unlikely to be re­examined.

She plans to take her case to a private court. In the meantime, she hopes the film will tell the story of a miscarriage of justice for younger generations. “Because it’s always going to surface,” she says. “The film is my hope.”

Out of Thin Air will be broadcast on BBC Four on Monday 14 August and available on Netflix from September.

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‘Every Icelander knows about this case.’

In 1974 two men vanished several months apart. At the time, Iceland had a population

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of just over 200,000 and was a close, tight knit community, where crime was relatively rare. This infamous case ­ which soon became a double murder investigation ­ shook the country and the police were under intense pressure to find the people responsible.

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But the police got nowhere: there were no bodies, no witnesses and no forensic evidence. Then six suspects were arrested and confessed to the murders and faced long, harsh sentences. It appeared that justice had been done.

Nothing could be further from the truth...

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Erla Bolladottir and her boyfriend, Saevar Ciesielski were the first to be arrested. They were two hippies riding the crest of the small, anti­establishment wave in Reykjavík.

They had originally been convicted for petty fraud but were suddenly confessing to double murder. Erla, was terrified, she was only 20 at the time and had been separated from her small baby. Under intense pressure, she gave the police names of other people who were allegedly involved. Before long six people confessed to the murders. But something didn’t add up ­ their stories didn’t match.

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Trump’s Quick Response To Barcelona Attack Makes His Charlottesville Reactions Look Even Worse In order to convict them for murder, the confessions would have to be consistent.

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Enter Karl Shultz. A German ‘supercop’ who had cracked the infamous Baader­ Meinhof gang. He was brought to Iceland to solve the case, and he oversaw the interrogations to ‘harmonise’ these conflicting and often contradictory stories. The confessions had to be aligned. The suspects were kept in solitary confinement for long stretches. One of the accused ­ Trggvi Leifsson ­ spent the longest recorded stint outside Guantanamo Bay ­ 655 days ­ in solitary confinement. The suspects were also given powerful drugs and subjected to water torture and sleep deprivation. Police

Spanish Police Foil Terror Attack Just Hours After Pedestrians Mown enact the crimes again and again. They were denied legal counsel and assumed to be Down In Barcelona spent weeks taking them out to search the vast lava fields for the bodies and to re­ guilty.

Forty years later this notorious murder case was reopened when new evidence brought into question everything that had gone before. This led to a major government inquiry which exposed the great incompetence and abuses of the police investigation.

This inquiry triggered a process which will be heard this autumn by Iceland’s Supreme Court who will consider whether to acquit all those convicted of murder.

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What makes this case so unique, is that five out of the six were said to suffer from Memory Distrust Syndrome. They started to distrust of their own minds and furthermore what was suggested to them during interrogation became more real than their own recollections. Memory Distrust Syndrome can create confusion so extreme that people may confess to crimes they didn’t commit ­ even something as a serious as murder.

Today, most of the Icelandic population now believe them to be innocent. According to the former Minister of the Interior, Ogmundur Jonasson, the case will be a black mark upon Iceland’s ‘collective conscience’ until ‘justice [is] done’. But the defendants have had their lives and their very sense of self shattered by the experience. Even today, some of them still harbour doubts about whether they did it or not...

Outofthinairfilm.com Out of Thin Air is on BBC Storyville, BBC Four on 14 August at 10pm and BBC

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The Strange Case of the Innocents Who Confessed to Murders They Didn’t Commit - VICE

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CRIME

The Strange Case of the Innocents Who Confessed to Murders They Didn’t Commit AMELIA ABRAHAM Aug 11 2017, 9:00am

Mugshots of the six suspects

In 1974, a group of innocent people mysteriously admitted to a double homicide they had nothing to do with. They weren't covering for anyone or seeking attention; they truly believed they'd done it.

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here's a famous criminal case in Icelandic history, still unresolved, that every Icelander knows. It involves the disappearance and suspected murder of two men, Gudmundur Einarsson, in January of 1974, and Geirfinnur Einarsson in November

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The Strange Case of the Innocents Who Confessed to Murders They Didn’t Commit - VICE

of the same year.

The first, Gudmundur, was heading home from a nightclub when, drunk, he decided to walk the freezing 10km journey back to his house. He was seen by a few drivers, stumbling about or failing to hitch a ride. It's not known when he disappeared into the landscape, but he never made it home, his body was never discovered. Icelandic authorities searched for him for a few weeks, but disappearances are quite common in Iceland, and after a month they just wrote it off as a mystery.

Gudmundur would have likely been forgotten if it wasn't for the disappearance, that November, of Geirfinnur. One night he got a phone call and left his home to drive to a harbour cafe. He was never seen again. The police began to search for both men, wondering if the deaths were linked. The men weren't related, but the fact they had the same surname is an indicator of how close-knit Icelandic society is. At the time, Iceland had a population of just 200,000 people and a very low rate of crime: murders almost never happened. Despite this, the Icelandic police became convinced they were dealing with a double homicide, and came under pressure from the media to come up with answers.

The mysterious case is the subject of a new documentary, coming to BBC Four and Netflix this month, called Out of Thin Air. It's the first feature length film to tell the story of the Icelandic disappearances in detail, and like all good recent true crime thrillers – the Amanda Knox documentary, Making a Murderer, Serial – it takes as its heart a fascinating miscarriage of justice. What's different about the Icelandic case is that the people who were sent down for the murders confessed to the crime, even though they were innocent.

All six of the people charged, to a varying degree, suffered from what's called memory distrust syndrome – a phenomenon whereby you doubt your own memories so deeply that your mind starts to fabricate new ones, a type of "source amnesia", where the source of learnt information somehow becomes confused or replaced entirely.

The police eventually gave up on the investigations around both disappearances. But two years later, when they were questioning a 20-year-old woman named Erla Bolladottir on an unrelated fraud charge, they showed her a picture of Gudmundur and asked if she knew him.

She told investigators she'd met him at a party and that she could recall a dream from the

https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/xww8nk/the-strange-case-of-the-innocents-who-confessed-to-murders-they-didnt-commit[15/08/2017 11:17:17]

The Strange Case of the Innocents Who Confessed to Murders They Didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t Commit - VICE

night he went missing, in which her boyfriend, Saevar Ciesielski, an LSD-taking petty criminal, was outside her room with what looked like a body. Saevar and four of his closest friends were quickly brought into the station, and along with Erla questioned intensively.

Their stories kept changing, and details didn't all match up, but one by one they each admitted to their suspected crimes, and were eventually charged. Saevar got a life sentence, Erla three years, and the rest around 12 years each.

Crime reconstruction, Credit: Icelandic National Archive

G

isli Gudjonsson, a world-renowned expert in forensic pathology, is one of the leading researchers on memory distrust syndrome, and became interested in the phenomenon while working for the Icelandic CID in the 1970s, just as the case

of the Icelandic Six was unfolding. He's since dedicated his career to explaining false memories in courts of law, as well as writing papers on its causes and effects.

"Memory distrust syndrome is a profound distrust of your own memory," he explains, "particularly during lengthy interrogation, where you begin to accept you've been involved in

https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/xww8nk/the-strange-case-of-the-innocents-who-confessed-to-murders-they-didnt-commit[15/08/2017 11:17:17]

The Strange Case of the Innocents Who Confessed to Murders They Didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t Commit - VICE

a crime which you have nothing to do with. It can happen when people fail to remember what they were doing at the time â&#x20AC;&#x201C; if it was a long time ago, say, and they don't have their diary, or if drinking or substance misuse has made the memory weaker."

"They were given drugs like benzodiazepines and antipsychotics, allegedly to calm them down or because they couldn't sleep. The conditions were terrible, it was a perfect storm for those people to not know what's real and what's not real."

Gisli has worked on over 500 cases of memory distrust syndrome since the 1980s, when research on the topic started to emerge. He testified in the case of the Guildford Four, for example, the high profile false-conviction of four people who were suspected of an IRA bombing. Gisli's work has found that memory distrust syndrome tends to occur when a person is for some reason already vulnerable, or more prone to police compliance. They might have been kept in solitary confinement for a long time, they might be grieving, or mentally unwell, or they might have low self esteem and be overly willing to accept that they did something they shouldn't have. Then, the idea that they are guilty is usually impressed upon them by the police.

The concept is not to be confused with voluntary confessions, says Gisli, whereby people go to the police and say they did something because they're seeking attention or notoriety, or because they're taking on a case for a friend. Rather, it's a deep seated internal belief that you actually committed a crime you were not present for.

Gisli was brought in to testify in the Iceland Six case when it was reopened in 2011, after prison diaries of one of the men who had been charged with the murders were passed from the man's daughter to a reporter and showed serious signs of memory distrust syndrome, as well as foul play, such as the police drugging the suspects. For Gisli, it was emotional to return to a case he knew so well.

"The advantage of the fact I was there 40 years ago is that I knew what the atmosphere was

https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/xww8nk/the-strange-case-of-the-innocents-who-confessed-to-murders-they-didnt-commit[15/08/2017 11:17:17]

The Strange Case of the Innocents Who Confessed to Murders They Didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t Commit - VICE

like in the holding prison, how uncomfortable those small, solitary cells with just a bed were, how you couldn't even go to the toilet without ringing a bell," he says. In the documentary, he explains that the Icelandic Six's confessions were unreliable because they'd each been extensively interrogated for hundreds of hours, longer than in any other case he's ever worked on. "In Britain, it's three days, and if you're not charged you're out. But there it was endless: what to do with yourself?"

Erla Bolladottir's mugshot

A

ndy Glynne is the producer of Out of Thin Air, as well as a trained clinical psychologist. He was fascinated by the story of the Icelandic Six for what he calls the awe factor. "Those six people's lives were turned totally upside down,"

he says. "They had no idea when they were going to get out, had their loved ones taken away, and had no judiciary arm backing them up, because the police and the courts were run by the same people in Iceland back then. On top of that, the six were given drugs like benzodiazepines and antipsychotics, allegedly to calm them down or because they couldn't sleep. The conditions were terrible â&#x20AC;&#x201C; it was a perfect storm for those people to not know what's real and what's not real." The other reason the story interested him, he says, was because, while in many ways it was extraordinary, it could happen to anyone.

https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/xww8nk/the-strange-case-of-the-innocents-who-confessed-to-murders-they-didnt-commit[15/08/2017 11:17:17]

The Strange Case of the Innocents Who Confessed to Murders They Didn’t Commit - VICE

Andy explains: "In the 1990s, one of the biggest studies on memory not related to forensic settings was psychologists Elizabeth Loftus and Jim Coan's experiment 'Lost in the Mall', where they asked a group of adults to remember childhood memories and got their family to help construct what those memories were: their favourite holidays, the clothes they wore.

Loftus sat down with all of the participants, gave them five memories to remember, and in amongst the real memories she gave them a fake one: 'Remember the time you were lost in a mall?' None of them ever had been, but with prompts, not only did a percentage go 'oh yeah', but they started to fill out the gaps; how long their mum was looking for them, how great it was when they were found again. Twenty-five percent recalled a memory that never happened. So it's a normal thing. And that's a terrifying proposition."

Gisli has worked on a range of high profile cases where memory distrust syndrome has affected regular people, like a soldier whose friend fell off a cliff when they were walking home from a bar. Suspected of pushing the friend, ridden with grief and drunk at the time of the incident, the soldier failed a polygraph test and then confessed to the murder, later to retract his confession when the true memory returned. Gisli has also worked on a number of cases on death row in America that have helped to stop executions. "As an expert witness I work closely with the police, defence, prosecution and police to look at the vulnerabilities of people in the context they were questioned to try to help the court," he explains. "And what I and my colleagues have shown over the years is that, if you're genuinely innocent, you're surprised you're being arrested, you're not prepared and you basically want to get out. Even normal individuals, given the right circumstances, can make a false confession to murder and remember doing it as well."

Countries and law systems, however, aren't quick to agree that their systems are prone to false confessions, says Gisli. "When I was testifying in the USA, the view expressed to my colleagues and I was that false confessions don't happen in America. Then I go to other countries and hear exactly the same – 'We don't have those in Italy,' they say. There's a resistance; people have an inherent trust that nobody would confess to a crime like murder unless they'd done it because the consequences are so severe. But that's not true." Especially not, he adds, under governments around the world – including the latest Republican government in the US – which condone torture and rendition. "Confessions alone did, historically, lead to convictions. Today, theoretically, they shouldn't, but they do."

https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/xww8nk/the-strange-case-of-the-innocents-who-confessed-to-murders-they-didnt-commit[15/08/2017 11:17:17]

The Strange Case of the Innocents Who Confessed to Murders They Didn’t Commit - VICE

WATCH: Giants of Iceland

C

ases like the Icelandic Six and the Guildford Four have shaped research on the topic, and since the 90s police and judges have become more aware that they need to be more careful in the police interviews to have a firm case in court, says

Gisli. "The British police started using formal interviewing techniques – what's called the Peace Model, which is based on being open minded and transparent and searching for the truth, rather than assuming people were guilty," he says. His research has helped dictate what these guidelines are. "There should be clear questions, not leading questions – they shouldn't question people for more than six hours, and they should record from the start to the end."

England is so ahead of the game on these interrogation policies, Gisli explains proudly, that Norway, New Zealand and Australia are now using adaptations of the Peace Model.

Still, the expert urges things not to stagnate. His worry is that while England is leading the field, police funding cuts could affect the interview training that police officers here receive.

"Courts require details of what a person did, and I worry that another risk with cuts is that police rapport is cut down, trying to make it quicker with, 'Did you do it or didn't you do it?'

Elsewhere, countries like America need to change their practice, Gisli says. "They've had https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/xww8nk/the-strange-case-of-the-innocents-who-confessed-to-murders-they-didnt-commit[15/08/2017 11:17:17]

The Strange Case of the Innocents Who Confessed to Murders They Didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t Commit - VICE

around 350 DNA exonerations since 1989, proving confessions unreliableâ&#x20AC;Ś but still, their tactics don't change."

Gisli believes that if the rules of the Peace Model were followed in the Iceland case, the false imprisonments would not have happened. "The courts were colluding with the police, turning a blind eye to the breach of codes of practice," he sighs. "There was a presumption that they got the right people, and the lack of bodies made them panic."

The fallout for those convicted has been severe as a consequence. In Out of Thin Air, Erla tells the cameras how fickle a thing she now understands memory to be, and that the moment you acknowledge your memories might not reflect your experiences; it can play havoc with your sense of self. After Saevar served his sentence he began to campaign for his innocence, but died before he was able to clear his name. The other men, says Gisli, still had to live with the confusion of why they confessed to a crime they did not commit.

"Imagine the anxiety of that, 40 years on."

Out of Thin Air will be broadcast on Storyville, BBC Four, on Monday the 14th of August, and will be available on Netflix from September.

@millyabraham

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Realscreen » Archive » Hot Docs ’17: Memory questioned in “Out of Thin Air”

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DOCUMENTARY

Hot Docs ’17: Memory questioned in “Out of Thin Air”

By Selina Chignall

May 1, 2017

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emory is fragile, and often changes over time.

In the new feature documentary Out of Thin Air, which will enjoy a world premiere at Hot Docs Monday (May 1), UK director Dylan Howitt explores that theme through the most infamous murder cases in Iceland’s history. Two unrelated men, Gudmundur Einarsson and Geirfinnur Einarsson, disappeared in 1974 within ten months of one another and their bodies were never found.

Gudmundur was the first to disappear on a cold, snowy night in January.

The 18-year old casual laborer never made it back home near the town of Hafnarfjordur, south of Reykjavik, from a party he was attending. Then, in November, while at home with his family, 32-year old Geirfinnur received a phone call that took him out to a harbor cafe in Keflavik. He parked his car nearby, got out and never returned.

The murders set off a national crisis in the small, remote country that, until then, was unfamiliar with violence of such magnitude.

“The word ‘Geirfinnur’, who was one the people who went missing, has become part of common folklore. If you lost something or go into an undiscovered room it’s like ‘Oh, will you find Gerfinnur there?’ Everybody has an opinion about it,” Andy Glynne, a clinical psychologist and executive producer of Out of Thin Air, tells realscreen.

DOCUMENTARY

Six people – five men and one woman – were eventually arrested and sent http://realscreen.com/2017/05/01/hot-docs-17-memory-questioned-in-out-of-thin-air/[24/08/2017 09:51:26]

Realscreen » Archive » Hot Docs ’17: Memory questioned in “Out of Thin Air”

“Shot in the Dark,” “Cocaine Prison” set for CIFF ’17

to prison for the crime, to which they confessed. One of the men received the longest sentence in Icelandic history – life plus one year.

More recently, the case has come back to the forefront of discussion when the murder cases were reopened in 2015 following a report by a task force appointed by the country’s Ministry of the Interior to review the cases.

In February 2017, the ministry’s committee said the murder cases would be reheard by the Supreme Court.

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Glynne was instantly gripped by the murders when he first read about them on a BBC website.

With its frigid, rocky countryside and small population, Iceland represents a bygone era where everyone knows everyone, he says, adding, “It’s a country with a small-town ‘Fargo’ sensibility.”

But it wasn’t just the true crime aspect that grabbed his attention: The story, he says, is “fascinating in itself — psychology of memory. What is real and what isn’t real?”

It proved a difficult film to make, in part because the story is so dense. With the trend towards serialized docs like Netflix’s Making a Murderer, Glynne thought this project could easily morph into a 10-part series. But, as a feature doc, the challenge became distilling all the twists and turns into a single narrative.

“What we were trying to do is not make this into a miscarriage-of-justice story. It wasn’t a forensic, investigative, journalistic film. We’re not trying to come to conclusions of who did what, guilty or not guilty. What we really wanted it about was memory and the fallibility of memory,” says Glynne.

When interviewing people — 24 in all — the team strove to stay neutral on people’s guilt or innocence, which Glynne says helped them maintain good relationships with the subjects because they didn’t have an agenda.

http://realscreen.com/2017/05/01/hot-docs-17-memory-questioned-in-out-of-thin-air/[24/08/2017 09:51:26]

Realscreen » Archive » Hot Docs ’17: Memory questioned in “Out of Thin Air”

“I think creatively it helped us keep focus of what the film was about; with such a dense subject matter its easy to get lost in the detail.”

Glynne says the starkly beautiful landscape of Iceland also plays a prominent role of the film – almost a character in itself. To that end, cinematographer Bergsteinn Bjorgulfsson was brought on board to help craft the narrative tone through sweeping shots of the landscape.

Music is also integral, adding a subtle, melancholic vibe to the film.

Looking for a Nordic minimalist aesthetic, Glynne turned to BAFTA-award winning instrumentalist and producer Ólafur Arnalds, who also did the score and end credits for ITV’s Broadchurch in 2013.

This time, Glynne says, “We opted for a very subtle piano effect and strings. We scored it all and recorded it live.”

The single biggest production issue on the 12-month shoot was not something anyone anticipated in Iceland, however: Waiting for the snow.

“This winter was one of the warmest in Iceland’s history in the past 200 years,” says Glynne of the frustration.

Out of Thin Air world premieres May 1 at 8:45 p.m. ET/PT at the Scotiabank Theater

TAGS: Andy Glynne, Hot Docs '17, Mosaic Films, Out of Thin Air

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When murder is just a memory | The Psychologist

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When murder is just a memory Kim Drake watches a new Storyville documentary on false confessions and memory distrust syndrome.

23rd August 2017

Related articles Looking Back: Psychologists in the witness box Sound familiar?

Crime prevention

Most read Overrated: The predictive power of attachment Our turbulent minds The limits of empathy

It’s Iceland, 27 January 1974: Gudmundur Einarsson disappears.

On 19 November 1974 a second man, Geirfinnur Einarsson, disappears.

12 December 1975: A man, Saevar Ciesielski, is arrested. He tells the police that an argument had ended in Gudmundur’s death.

Saevar’s girlfriend, Erla Bolladottir, is arrested the following day. After questioning, she

https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/when-murder-just-memory[24/08/2017 10:13:28]

Contribute Write for a large and diverse audience

When murder is just a memory | The Psychologist

reports the interviewer suggesting she’d witnessed Saevar’s involvement. Police were also interested in knowing whether Saevar knew anything about what happened to Geirfinnur Einarsson. The body has never been found to this day.

In the end, Saevar and three other men supposedly involved: Kristjan Vidarsson, Tryggi Leifsson, and Albert Skaftason were held in custody for Gudmundur’s murder.

Saevar and Kristjan also made a statement that they were present when Geirfinnur died.

Despite subsequent claims of innocence and statement retractions by the accused, as well as a complete lack of evidence on the part of the police, in total six individuals ended up convicted of the murder of both Gudmundur and Geirfinnur.

On reviewing diary entries made by the men whilst in prison, however, it emerged that maybe the confessions were unreliable. The heavy-handed nature of the investigation materialised: the six didn’t have access to legal representation, and they were interrogated many more times than the police reports said. Saevar, for example, was interviewed 180 times for 340 hours, and spent 615 days in solitary. Erla was interrogated 105 times and spent 241 days in solitary. Tryggvi was kept in solitary for 655 days. The police destroyed them psychologically.

Dylan Howitt’s masterful Storyville charts the account of one of the most substandard, and damaging to those accused, criminal investigations in history. The programme is well directed, and I especially liked Erla Bolladottir’s involvement. Her narrative in her own words, as well as the participation of the children of the accused, makes what happened especially poignant to the viewer. The public got to glimpse how broken Saever became, as a result of his failed attempts to clear his name, and the toll this investigation took on all of them.

If there was any weakness at all, it was that early on in the programme, before any sense that the confessions could be false is brought to light, it manages to conjure up this image of Saevar’s criminality and potential guilt. The narrator talks about Saevar and the others lying to the police. Yet, this isn’t true: they didn’t purposely lie to the police, but were coerced into memory distortions through a flawed police investigation.

The six had problematic backgrounds, and they weren’t well educated, but such factors – as well as being young – are probably what exacerbated their susceptibility to police coercion in the first place.

As the documentary continues though, my initial concern about its direction was overturned. Forensic Psychologist Gisli Gudjonsson’s contribution to the case and programme is pivotal in re-directing discussion away from the idea of the men lying, and towards the notion that the six were in fact extremely vulnerable. It transpires that the police found gaps in their memories and worked on them until they began to think: maybe something did happen and I don’t remember.

This case is of utmost importance and interest, because it highlights how easily ordinary people can end up very vulnerable. Notwithstanding advances in police interviewing techniques, the risk of unreliable confessions and memories from general population individuals remains an issue to this day, given that a large proportion of vulnerable detainees are still not identified in custody and given the protection they need.

https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/when-murder-just-memory[24/08/2017 10:13:28]

When murder is just a memory | The Psychologist

- Dr Kim E. Drake is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychology at Swansea University. Read her article on false confessions in our archive, along with our interview with Gisli Gudjonsson.

Watch the programme now on BBC iPlayer.

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Behind The Scenes

Storyville: Out of Thin Air: Murder In Iceland, BBC4 14 August, 2017 | By Andy Glynne

Looking back at a 40 year-old unsolved mystery Production company Mosaic Films; Sagafilm Commissioner Kate Townsend Length 1 x 85 minutes TX 10pm, 14 August, BBC4 Director Dylan Howitt

Producers Andy Glynne; Marget Jonadottir Editor Miikka Leskinen Post-house Envy Two strange disappearances and a dark unsolved mystery made for a fascinating and compelling story. But making a documentary about two alleged murders, which may or may not have taken place, over 40 years ago in Iceland presented challenges from the start.

It was a sensitive subject; the original case had shaken the national psyche of the tiny island community. The years that underpinned the investigation were a period of great upheaval in the political and cultural history of the country.

The story is over four decades old, but in Iceland it feels current and personal, almost like a family saga. For many, it symbolises the loss of innocence and there’s still a sense of trauma.

To make everything more complicated, though six people were convicted of the crimes, the only evidence against them was their confessions.

Later, it would emerge that they’d been the victims of such extreme interrogation techniques that they had come to doubt the certainty of their own memories.

While most of the Icelandic population now believe the convicted individuals to be innocent, some of the defendants themselves still harbour doubts about whether they did it or not.

Two of the accused are now dead, and two more are unwilling to talk. There are no recordings of the interrogations that took place, and the notes in the police files are full of inconsistencies. There were a hundred unreliable versions of what had happened.

An Icelander made a documentary on the subject more than 20 years ago – and had a nervous breakdown. Journalists approaching the case are warned that they ‘might be stepping into a black hole’. Foolishly or not, we stepped right in.

At first, we were concerned about the tight-knit community closing ranks. We quickly discovered that everyone literally does know everyone, and when you

interview one person in the morning, everyone else knows your name in Iceland by lunchtime.

We feared access might be scuppered by a collective vow silence. One negative interview could stop the film in its tracks.

Thankfully, this didn’t happen. Perhaps it’s because Icelanders are naturally open people – living in a small country with a country-town feel, there’s implicit trust in others.

Or maybe it’s because we were always upfront about what we wanted to achieve and never had cause to lie or deceive anyone. Either way, everyone talked. And talked, and talked…

From the very beginning we were always wanting to create something with the cinematic aesthetic and pace of Errol Morris’s Thin Blue Line, crossed with the contemporary feel of a Scandi-Noir, with an evocative and melancholic music score, washed-out colours and a dark, complex mood.

We built the film around interviews with key characters and reconstructions, interweaved with the limited pictures and archive from the 1970s.

We used a narrative device that presents the six convicted as guilty, but as the film progresses and the details of the case are revealed, seemingly trustworthy information begins to warp and twist, creating the sense of disorientation similar to what the suspects themselves went through. What is real and what isn’t?

A film of this scale takes a long time to make and costs a lot of money. We were fortunate to partner with Icelandic co-producer Margret Jonasdottir’s Sagafilm, which sourced grants from national funds and tax breaks.

Andy Glynne, My tricks of the trade •

Be 100% honest with all contributors. We took no sides, but were completely up front about the film and made ourselves available to answer any questions and concerns. I think this openness helped to create a climate of trust, but also prevented us from over-worrying about editorial decisions.

•

You can’t rely on the weather – as we discovered with the lack of snow in Iceland.

Have a contingency budget for SFX snow, rain or wind machines.

•

Believe in your idea. This might sound very pop-psychology, but think about whether your idea has all the right elements - great story, compelling characters, superb access and a strong visual approach.

•

In co-productions, you commit to snuggling up with a stranger for what could easily be a long period of time. Despite all best intentions, things may go wrong so preparing a robust pre-nup is essential for both parties.

BBC Storyville came in too, offering both editorial support and a financial contribution to the film, but we desperately needed to find more funds.

The main theme of the film is memory – its fallibility, weakness and its ability to turn fiction into fact – so we turned to the Wellcome Trust, who have collaborated with us many times before.

It put finance in through its co-production fund and provided some really helpful editorial support too. But we still didn’t have enough…

Then the knight-in-brand-new-ever-so-shiny-armour that is Netflix gave me a call.

We told them how much we needed funding, and they offered it to us.

Naturally, there were a few strings attached, principally around international distribution and rights, but the opportunity to reach our budget and a diverse range of international territories was impossible to refuse. Our journey had ended and despite the complex twists and turns, it was an exciting and fulfilling process.

Dylan Howitt, director Out of Thin Air is built on the first person, eye-witness testimonies of the people who were there.

We’d spent four months editing more than 20 interviews into a viable dramatic structure, including archive footage and music. But the drama reconstruction was still to be captured.

We had a budget for just seven days of filming, both on location and on four studiobuilt sets, so we had to be very efficient.

Working with DoP Bergsteinn Björgúlfsson (Trapped, Of Horses and Men) and drama co-director Oskar Jonasson (Reykjavik-Rotterdam), we went through our rough edit scene by scene and storyboarded exactly what we needed to shoot.

The Icelandic’s cast and crew’s knowledge and aesthetic helped inform every frame.

Creating an authentic 1970s setting needed incredible attention to detail in art direction and costume design, from the specific green of the walls in the prison cells, to the period cars we used to block signs of modern life when shooting exteriors.

We filmed in November, when the short hours of daylight worked to our advantage, as most of the story takes place at night.

This is a story about the fragility of the human mind and the fickleness of memory.

We wanted the audience to feel like they were inside the heads of the contributors as they lived through these events, even as they struggled to remember exactly what had happened.

We decided to film with an Arri Alexa using old glass, anamorphic Kowa lenses, which brought a softness to the image, and beautiful streaking flares. They evoked both the period and a fractured, subjective headspace. We also shot everything at 50fps in dream-like slow motion.

Although we cast actors who closely resemble the real people, we filmed them so you never see faces clearly, throwing the focus elsewhere. The audience is given space to project themselves into the story.

Back in London, we worked with colourist Vicki Matich at Envy to create a dark and desaturated wintery look. We hope the overall effect takes the audience on an unsettling, compelling journey through 1970s Iceland to experience a real life Nordic Noir.

Real Life Nordic Noir: Out of Thin Air – Cinema Scandinavia

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 Documentary, Iceland, Interviews, Issue 19

In 1974 two men vanished without a trace in Iceland. They were never found, and six suspects were held

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in solitary confinement. Between the media and local pressure and the highly questionable techniques of interrogation used by the police, the six suspects signed confessions of murder despite not remembering

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MAY 2017

In 1974 two men vanished without a trace in Iceland. They were never found, and six suspects were held in solitary confinement. Between the media and local pressure and the highly questionable techniques of interrogation used by the police, the six suspects signed confessions of murder despite not remembering committing the crime. Out of Thin Air is an investigative overview of the crime, the interrogations, and the response of the Icelandic people in what is considered one of the biggest cases in recent history.

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MAY 2017

Out of Thin Air Directed by Dylan Howitt / Produced by Andy Glynne from Mosaic Films & Margret Jonasdottir from SagaFilm / Country: United Kingdom & Iceland / Language: English & Icelandic Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival (World Premiere)

NORDIC DOCUMENTARY FOCUS

TRUE CRIME / NORDIC NOIR / ICELAND

Dylan Howitt

police. However, it turned out impossible

How did you hear about this case?

involved in the case in Reykjavik from 1975

There was a radio documentary on the BBC,

would speak to us and actually have never

and it was immediately clear that this was

given an interview to anyone. Also, two

an exceptional story. It’s such an iconic

of the six who were convicted have never

case in Iceland, so mysterious and still

given an interview either. We invited all of

unresolved and talked about more than forty

them to be involved but without success.

years later. But I don’t think many people

outside of Iceland know anything about it.

regretted this decision to tell the story in

So, we (Andy Glynne, the producer, Ant

the first person! It is such a difficult and

Adeane, the assistant producer, and myself)

complicated story to tell without narrator

decided to look into it more.

or a character that is investigative – a

to be that comprehensive; none of the investigating police and judges who were

I must admit there were times I

policeman or a journalist studying the case

Sigursteinn Másson's documentary is titled Execution

How did you then approach the making of the documentary?

that the audience can follow. Think of how

Initially, we just went in and talked to

drive their storytelling. But, hopefully, what

everyone we could. We met with the

you do get from this way of working is a

police who investigated the disappearances

visceral and emotional experience of what

in 1974, journalists, lawyers, clinical

these people went through.

psychologists, prison guards. Sigursteinn

Serial or The Jinx used those elements to

According to the

Másson, who made an influential

Law (Aðför að

documentary in the late 90’s about the case

Considering the case, what stood out to you?

was a great help. To be honest, it was feeling

The more I considered the case, the more

like an incredibly difficult and complicated

elusive it became. If you strip it down to

story to tell, and it was only when we met

just what we know to be true, there’s so

two of the six convicts in the case, Guðjón

little there. There are so few facts. So what

Skarphéðinsson and Erla Bolladóttir, that

happened was people began projecting their

a possible film-making approach became

own ideas. I began to see the story as a giant

clearer. Just to tell the story in the first

projection screen; a blank space onto which

person and the present tense as much as

the population of Iceland projected their

possible, through the eyes of all the people

fears and prejudices, the police projected

who were there, both the convicted and the

their theories, even the convicted projected

lögum)

with the stories they told. The people who

20

MAY 2017

NORDIC DOCUMENTARY FOCUS Top: Erla Bolladรณttir Bottom: Reenactment of Erla in prison Images courtesy of Mosaic Films

21

MAY 2017

In a country like Iceland where everyone knows everyone, it’s quite hard to stick your neck out and point the finger at somebody else because at the end of the day you do have to live there. were being accused gave really detailed –

entirely foreign perspective. We produced

quite cinematic – confessions. But there

the documentary with Margrét Jónasdóttir

was no solid evidence. It’s so strange. For

from Sagafilm who was amazing. In our

a country like Iceland, that’s so civilised,

early discussions, she said it was good to

peaceful and friendly, it’s hard to believe

have an outsider’s perspective because in a

something like this could have happened.

country like Iceland where everyone knows

But it did, and we explore how.

everyone, it’s quite hard to stick your neck

NORDIC DOCUMENTARY FOCUS

out and point the finger at somebody else

Could something like this happen again today?

because at the end of the day you do have

The legal system has changed a lot. Back

come in and point the fingers and take the

then the police and the judiciary were hand

blame!

in glove, not clearly separated like today.

The key investigator in this case was a judge,

Icelandic in style and aesthetic. 95% of

not a policeman, and he had the power to

the names in the credits are Icelandic. For

extend custody very easily for thirty days at

example, we had the fantastic director of

a time. It was a system very open to abuse.

photography, Bergsteinn Björgúlfsson (Of

Also, the media in Iceland is much more

Horses and Men, The Deep). I co-directed

robust now.

the re-enactments with Óskar Jónasson (In

Front of Others), who was great. The music

Crimes of this nature are very rare

to live there. It’s probably easier for me to

But I like to think the film is very

in Iceland, but at the start of the year a girl

was beautifully composed by Ólafur Arnalds

went missing and it became a huge deal with

(Broadchurch, Life in a Fishbowl) and Bjarni

everyone talking about it, much like this

Massi (Rams) was our very talented art

case in the 1970’s. But this time they found

director. The quality of the artistry and the

the girl’s body and the people who did it,

craftsmanship from the whole Icelandic crew

whereas the two men who disappeared in the

was second to none. So lots of what you see

70’s have never been found.

is Icelandic, but the overarching narrative and approach is from an outsider.

You’re a British director coming into Iceland to make a film about their biggest criminal case in recent history.

Did the outsiders perspective help you?

It’s not surprising the the film is so cinematic in feel, then...

We knew we wanted a cinematic feel from the first meeting we had over a beer in a pub

When I started the research, Icelandic

in London. I wanted to evoke the specific

journalists would say to me watch out for

time and place - that part of Iceland in the

this case, it’s a horrible ‘black hole’. It kind

mid-seventies. So, we worked hard on

of was! There are so many different opinions

picking locations, clothing, hair, music, the

to negotiate and it’s so political. Some

whole thing. Bergsteinn shot with vintage

people are sure to dislike our approach.

lenses, the whole colour palette evokes the

1970’s, especially when combined with

At the same time, this

documentary is a co-production with an

all the great archive footage we have. In

Icelandic company so, hopefully, it’s not an

the first part of the film we wanted to put

22

MAY 2017

the audience alongside Erla as she travels

it. When we did test screenings, we found,

through the story –­ meets Saevar, is arrested,

for example, that people got really stuck

interrogated, put in her cell, and is trying to

with the Icelandic names, and just couldn’t

remember what happened.

capture some of the twists and turns. I hope Icelanders will forgive certain omissions.

The documentary seems to fit neatly into the current Icelandic wave of film and television the UK are loving.

How do you create a documentary for the two countries?

The film will be shown on the BBC, on

Forty years later, everything about this case seems mysterious indeed...

It’s still a mystery and this is still very current. All the murder convictions have just been sent back to the Supreme Court.

RUV, and on Netflix. One of the biggest audiences in the UK and world could

Could we see an Out of Thin Air 2, then?

follow and enjoy, and that also brings

Yeah, it’s a possibility! •

challenges was how to make a film that

the story to Icelanders in a different way.

Because Icelanders know this case inside out, whereas the rest of the world don’t

Out of Thin Air premieres on Netflix on the 1st of July following BBC and RUV screenings.

know anything. So that was difficult! We had to make hard choices about cutting some of the complexity of the story so that people outside Iceland could follow

23

NORDIC DOCUMENTARY FOCUS

Iceland Images courtesy of Mosaic Films

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Published: 06:19 Updated: 08:57 Thursday 03 August 2017

IT WAS a murder 1,200 miles away with no bodies and no evidence, and possibly not even a victim. It was an odd case for a psychologist from Harrogate to take on.

The bizarre story of two men with the same surname who went missing a few months apart has transfixed the population of Iceland for four decades.

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Filming the feature Out of Thin Air in Iceland.

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Producer Andy Glynne

Six people confessed to their murders and went to prison, one of them for life, but many believed they had caved in only under extreme pressure from the police.

It is a story little told in Britain, until now.

Andy Glynne, a Yorkshire NHS worker turned film producer, who is behind an international feature on the case for the BBC and Netflix, said learning of the case had been a revelation.

“I had one of those moments of discovery ­ ‘Oh my God, I’ve never heard of that’ ­ and then I realised how big it was,” he said.

“I was a clinical psychologist, and this was all about memories and whether people were manipulated into believing something they then admitted to.

“What is memory, after all? Just because you remember something doesn’t mean it happened.”

It was in January 1974 that Iceland’s national nightmare began. The 18 year­old Gudmundur Einarsson disappeared while walking home, drunk, from a nightclub. Many believed he had slipped and died in the cold.

But 10 months later, another man, Geirfinnur Einarsson, also vanished. His car was parked outside a café on the harbour with the keys still in the ignition.

The two were not related, but conspiracy theorists had it that a serial killer with a surname fixation was at large ­ a scenario oddly echoed this year by the American TV series, Fargo ­ and the local police came under intense pressure to find him.

“They bit off more than they could chew,” said Mr Glynne, 44.

He added: “The place is truly Fargo­esque. In winter, we saw babies’ prams left out in

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sub­zero temperatures.”

It was two years after the first disappearance before police pulled in a suspect. Erla Bolladottir was being questioned about an unrelated fraud case when they showed her Gudmundur Einarsson’s picture. She not only knew him, she said, but had dreamt about him.

Convinced she was repressing traumatic memories, detectives subjected her to hours of interrogation, and eventually she began to wonder if she had witnessed something terrible.

Six months later, with more suspects brought in and locked up but not convicted, it started to look as if Iceland was harbouring an indigenous version of the Manson Family.

“There was no correlation between the judiciary and the police, so they could keep people in custody for as long as they wanted,” Mr Glynne said.

Eventually, they brought in Karl Schutz, the German “supercop” who had investigated the militant, far­left Baader­Mein​hof gang. On his watch, six people were found guilty and the country’s Minister of Justice declared the investigation over.

But it had only just begun. With only their confessions pointing to their guilt, the six insisted they had been coerced. In 2011, the alleged ringleader, Saevar Cieselski, died homeless in Copenhagen, still protesting his innocence, and after nearly 40 years, a government inquiry was announced. It has yet to report.

“The confessions were certainly unreliable,” said Mr Glynne. “But in our film, we don’t try to prove whether they were guilty or not. Without any bodies, we don’t even know if there was a crime in the first place.

“Everyone in Iceland has a theory on what happened. Many people think that at least one of the deaths was just an accident.”

The film’s director, Dylan Howitt, added: “It’s a black hole. The more you learn about it, the more elusive it becomes.”

• The feature­length film, Out of Thin Air, which will be seen on BBC4 on August 14 followed by an international release on Netflix, raised a rumoured £500,000 after an initial pitch at the annual Sheffield Documentary Festival.

“It was always going to be costly,” said producer Andy Glynne, who grew up in Leeds and whose family now lives in Harrogate.

“The BBC were very supportive but they didn’t put up much money. Then Netflix came in.”

For its director, Dylan Howitt, it was a homecoming of sorts ­ he had studied film at the city’s old arts college in Psalter Lane.

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Out of Thin Air Reviews and News Stories

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Source URL: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/ff8ccb6e-825f-11e7-868c-437ffe17833c

CULTURE

TV review: Quacks TV’s new wave of doctors lack incision Louis Wise e42c2920-77b1-4ec6-f1fc-f4b0f69d8d5a 20 Aug 2017 00:01:00

Quacks BBC2, Tue Trust Me BBC1, Tue Valkyrien C4, Sun Out of Thin Air BBC4, Mon Taxi of Mum and Dad C4, Thu The revelation that Charlie from Casualty is the BBC’s highest-paid soap actor reminds us that we love nothing more than a medic on the box; it also explains why actors are so keen to play them. Charlie and his colleagues having cornered the market in generic, knackered, seen-it-allness, though, we are getting ever more inventive riffs on the theme. Thus we have two new inpatients: Quacks (comic, historic, eccentric) and Trust Me (mad).Quacks is a new comedywith-a-hint-of-drama focused on the developments in modern medicine in early Victorian Britain. Its selection of strange cases and cures are all apparently based on true medical history, which is certainly a recommendation, if not quite a guarantee. Where comedy is concerned, the absolute last thing you care about is veracity; laughs don’t call for a fact-checker. See Blackadder for details. ● ● ● ● ●

However, it is fun to be reminded of just how insane medicine has always been, true progress achieved by us blundering, hospital gown billowing, arse-out, through an asylum’s worth of dodgy diagnoses. An elderly woman comes to see Rupert Everett’s doctor, afflicted with a pain in her nethers. “Fast for a week, ride a horse for two hours a day (not Sundays) and place a freshly cooked baked potato on the infected area,” Everett tells her. Wait — was the series consultant Gillian McKeith?

Stocked with a premium cast headed by Rory Kinnear, Quacks’ first half-hour showed some

promise, even if its humour seems less weird than its cases, which is a shame. Instead there was the sense of some aged Footlights working through a few sketches for Edinburgh; also, those cheery, cheeky but all-too-tittery laughs that are the lifeblood of Radio 4. At one point, Kinnear resorted to repeating the word “tracheotomy” in deliberately daft fashion and, while this could have been sheer absurdist genius, it wasn’t. It smacked of somebody frantically defibrillating the script, hoping a rolled “r” would do the trick.

Meanwhile, two episodes in, Jodie Whittaker continues her high-level case of identity fraud in Trust Me. Much fuss was made of this series — the new Doctor Who playing a wannabe doctor.

Really, though, one role has little bearing on the other, except to confirm that Whittaker is a very good actress in need of a decent vehicle. I’m not sure that Trust Me is it.

To recap, diligent nurse Cath has ended up taking her doctor friend’s identity, because she has been unfairly sacked from her previous job, and said pal has quit to do sheep farming in Australia (naturally). As with many of Whittaker’s roles, Cath seems a blend of stubborn mule and shaky mouse: faking it as a proper doctor in A&E, she throws herself into all sorts of hazardous situations, not least operating on seriously injured people that she has no qualification to.

Despite all this action and busyness, though, there is a suspiciously panicked, in-a-tizzy quality to Trust Me as a whole, as though it knows it really shouldn’t be getting away with it itself. A frantic soundtrack has been larded onto something that feels curiously banal underneath. Much of the second episode was spent with Cath, trying to get her papers in order, on the run from the man in HR. There is of course a fine line between what you can stomach and what seems tiresomely absurd. I won’t mind Trust Me’s extended bout of delirium if it comes to a satisfying conclusion, but it seems doubtful. Much more promising is the umpteenth noirish saga from up north-north — Norway’s Valkyrien.

I’m not entirely sure what happened in the first episode and, for once, that is a compliment.

There is just the sense of a scary web being spun, involving a 62m kroner heist, doomsday prophecies, radical medicine and lots of characters with one-syllable names. Leif! Unn! Per! It’s like trawling for the right shelf in Ikea.

If you were to pinpoint what makes Valkyrien so deliciously Scandi, you could look to the scene where the maverick doctor Ravn (Sven Nordin) attends the funeral of his wife. He delivers a eulogy, has a spat with a colleague and all seems pretty bog-standard; then his dodgy mate screeches down the road in a van with an injured criminal in the back. Ravn is chucked in with him, they speed off, then he promptly removes the man’s kidney in a garage.

What can you say? If Trust Me tried something like this, I’d sneer at it. In Valkyrien, though, it’s a hoot. That swerve from seeming sensibleness into utter dark bonkers is why we like our exports from Norway, Denmark and co; it seems in keeping with their character. It’s odd what you’ll forgive on the basis of national characteristics, though. If you accept the continuing misogyny and grotesquerie in Top of the Lake as just typically Australian — and I have a worrying feeling that I do — it’s not very flattering, or fair. (And yes, there is a sense by now that Top of the Lake has jumped all the sharks at Bondi — but we’ll come to that at a later date.)

Still, this is the kind of fun that fiction can have. Sometimes, something will come along to

remind you that reality can be much crueller and stranger. A chilly antidote to Valkyrien appeared last week in the shape of Out of Thin Air. This documentary recounted one of Iceland’s most notorious criminal cases. Two men go missing over the course of 1974, two apparently disconnected events. Panic builds in quiet little Iceland, which, after all, had the charm, the mentality and roughly the population of Cheltenham. Eventually the police zero in on a gang of young hippie ne’er-do-wells, headed by Saevar Ciesielski and his girlfriend, Erla Bolladottir. They extract testimonies from Bolladottir and various members of the group and five are convicted of murder, Bolladottir of perjury. Yet there are still no bodies, no locations and no really feasible motives; the accused retract their testimonies come the trial.

The documentary traced first the shaky piecing together of their story, then its complete unravelment. Many of the group were kept in solitary confinement for years and they claim the accusations were slowly placed in their head there, in an instance of brainwashing and scapegoating of the most abominable kind.

Erla, now 61, feels guilty for helping imprison the father of her child. She has the haunted look of someone permanently on the run: first from her staid background, then her dodgy relationship and ultimately from the recollections she says aren’t hers. “My memory is not some kind of mathematical machine in my head,” she protests, and this is the thesis of the entire film; it applies not just to her, but to the whole country, which has constantly had to remember these events and tried in vain to make sense of them.

What does Out of Thin Air teach us? Sometimes we need culprits, even when the crime isn’t clear. The police investigators directly involved in the case refused to speak to the film-makers, though, so we need a fuller picture. An investigation into the convictions has been opened.

Finally, Taxi of Mum and Dad followed various parents as they drive their offspring across the country, offering us a kind of Gogglebox on wheels, but without the box to goggle at. The really alarming thing wasn’t the obnoxious, earnest or blathering teens, but the parents mugging just as much for our attention and who had presumably been the ones signing the disclaimers.

Is rampant exhibitionism now a cross-generational trait? To judge from poor Kasey, 14, being chauffeured by her mum, it would seem so. “Whose mum tells them to take a selfie?” she moans.

She is then carted off to buy a bra.

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Is this the greatest true crime story never told?

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Is this the greatest true crime story never told?

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http://lwlies.com/articles/out-of-thin-air-documentary-trailer[24/08/2017 09:59:44]

Is this the greatest true crime story never told?

“E

very Icelander knows about this case.” So begins this strange and compelling documentary feature from director Dylan Howitt, which arrives in the UK soon via the BBC’s Storyville series.

In 1974 two men vanished several months apart. Back then, Iceland was a tight knit community of around 200,000 people. Everyone knew everyone, and this infamous case – which soon became a double murder investigation – shook the entire country to its core.

Now this sensational true crime story is being told in full for the first time. Out of Thin Air comprises first-person testimony, archive footage, personal diaries, false confessions, dramatic reconstruction and wrongful convictions, the film sheds new light on one of the most shocking miscarriages of justice ever witnessed in Europe.

Out of Thin Air premieres in the UK on 14 August on BBC Four. Check out the atmospheric trailer above and let us know your thoughts @LWLies PUBLISHED 10 JUN 2017

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http://lwlies.com/articles/out-of-thin-air-documentary-trailer[24/08/2017 09:59:44]

Out Of Thin Air: review 8 June, 2017

A real-life whodunnit from 1974 is the basis of Dylan Howitt’s gripping Iceland-set documentary Dir: Dylan Howitt. UK/Iceland.2017. 85mins Out Of Thin Air picks apart one of the most notorious murder cases in Iceland’s history with forensic precision.

Director Dylan Howitt combines diligent detective work in the manner of Errol Morris with dramatic reconstructions that have the look and tension of a fictional Scandi noir-style crime story. The result is a documentary that becomes a fascinating, compelling thriller in its own right.

Combing through a major crime investigation, Out Of Thin Air also finds space to contemplate the wider issues raised over the pursuit of an unreliable truth and the pressures on a police force to deliver a swift resolution to a situation that now seems beyond solution.

More than one person describes the disappearance of teenager Gudmundur Einarsson and thirtysomething Geirfinnur Einarsson in 1974 as a loss of innocence for an Iceland that considered itself a law-abiding, close-knit community far removed from the evils of the world.

Neither man’s body was ever found but the assumption of foul play triggered a sense of hysteria that had never previously been experienced in the country.

Six people were eventually sentenced for their part in the two murders. There was no evidence, no damning clues, no eyewitness accounts of what happened, just the statements made by the accused testifying to their own guilt.

An impressive roster of on-camera interviewees ranges from prison guards to policemen, journalists to forensic psychologist Gisli Gudjonsson, an expert in false confessions.

Howitt begins with Erla Bolladottir, who served prison time for embezzlement and her part in the two murders. She now claims to have no clear memory that any of it every really happened or that any of her testimony was true.

Howitt diligently follows the time frame of events from Einarsson’s disappearance in January 1974 through a second disappearance, arrests, conspiracy theories, accusations, convictions and lengthy appeals over the past forty years.

'Out of Thin Air' Review | Hollywood Reporter

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

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'Out of Thin Air': Film Review | Hot Docs 2017 9:36 AM PDT 5/11/2017 by Frank Scheck

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

Courtesy of HotDocs

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/thin-air-1002626[24/08/2017 10:24:10]

'Out of Thin Air' Review | Hollywood Reporter

THE BOTTOM LINE

Haunting but disjointed. 

Dylan Howitt's documentary recounts the complex story of Iceland's most notorious murder case.

The continuing craze for Scandinavian crime fiction should benefit Dylan Howitt’s documentary about Iceland’s most infamous murder case. Chronicling a convoluted tale, the truth of which may never be known for certain, Out of Thin Air is a stylishly executed but narratively muddled effort that confounds as much as it engrosses.

Recently given its world premiere at Toronto’s Hot Docs, the film should find especially receptive audiences on cable and streaming services.

The film concerns the 1974 disappearances of two unrelated men whose bodies were never found. The first, an 18-year-old man, vanished on a wintry night after attending a party. Months later, a 32-year-old father received a late-night phone call, drove to a café, parked his car and was never seen again.

READ MORE 'This Cold Life': Film Review | Hot Docs Suspicions fell on a group of young people including Erla Bolladottir and her boyfriend Saevar Ciesielski, who had previously been involved in an embezzling scheme. Along with four of their friends, they were accused by the police and subjected to intense marathon interrogations that resulted in their confessions. All were sent to prison, with Saever, who had been described as “evil incarnate” and compared in the media to Charles Manson, receiving the longest sentence. After their release years later, it came out that they had essentially been tortured and that their confessions may have been built on false memories.

The film vividly captures the country’s innocent atmosphere at the time of the horrific crimes and how shocked the Icelandic people were by the sudden intrusion of the “big bad world,” as one commentator puts it, into their peaceful lives. The nation became riveted by the trial, and everyone seemed to have an opinion about the suspects’ guilt or innocence. And even though the crimes took place more than 40 years ago, the case is still ongoing — the country’s Supreme Court has recently agreed to hear new arguments.

READ MORE http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/thin-air-1002626[24/08/2017 10:24:10]

'Out of Thin Air' Review | Hollywood Reporter

'My Life Without Air': Film Review | Hot Docs Director Howitt employs a skillful mixture of archival footage, talking head interviews and gorgeously photographed, dreamlike recreations, often redolent of Errol Morrisâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; The Thin Blue Line. He particularly focuses on modern-day interviews with Bolladottir, who despite having confessed to shooting one of the victims now steadfastly denies any involvement. Where the film runs into trouble is in its recounting of the complex storyline. Since the truth has so far proven elusive, it makes sense that it raises more questions than it answers. The problem is that situations and characters rush at the viewer in a bewildering blur, and even the questions it raises prove confusing. Long on moody atmosphere but short on narrative coherence, Out of Thin Air ends up being as frustrating as it is haunting.

Production company: Mosaic Films Director: Dylan Howitt Producers: Margaret Jonasdottir, Andy Glynne Executive producers: Kate Towsend, Lucy McDowell, Andy Glynne, Laufey Guojonsdottir Director of photography: Bergsteinn Bjorgulfsson Editor: Mikka Leskinen Composer: Olafur Arnalds Venue: Hot Docs 85 minutes

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/thin-air-1002626[24/08/2017 10:24:10]

'Out Of Thin Air': Sheffield Review | Reviews | Screen

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REVIEWS

'Out Of Thin Air': Sheffield Review 9 JUNE 2017

A real-life whodunnit from 1974 is the basis of Dylan Howitt’s gripping Iceland-set documentary Dir: Dylan Howitt.

UK/Iceland.2017. 85mins.

Out Of Thin Air picks apart one of the most notorious murder cases in Iceland’s history with forensic precision.

Director Dylan Howitt combines diligent detective work in the manner of Errol Morris with dramatic reconstructions that have the look and tension of a fictional Scandi noir-style crime story. The result is a documentary that becomes a fascinating, compelling thriller in its own right.

Out Of Thin Air makes a convincing case that truth and due process were early casualties in the quest for justice

https://www.screendaily.com/reviews/out-of-thin-air-sheffield-review/5118783.article[24/08/2017 09:42:22]

'Out Of Thin Air': Sheffield Review | Reviews | Screen

Combing through a major crime investigation, Out Of Thin Air also finds space to contemplate the wider issues raised over the pursuit of an unreliable truth and the pressures on a police force to deliver a swift resolution to a situation that now seems beyond solution.

More than one person describes the disappearance of teenager Gudmundur Einarsson and thirtysomething Geirfinnur Einarsson in 1974 as a loss of innocence for an Iceland that considered itself a law-abiding, close-knit community far removed from the evils of the world. Neither man’s body was ever found but the assumption of foul play triggered a sense of hysteria that had never previously been experienced in the country.

Six people were eventually sentenced for their part in the two murders. There was no evidence, no damning clues, no eyewitness accounts of what happened, just the statements made by the accused testifying to their own guilt.

An impressive roster of on-camera interviewees ranges from prison guards to policemen, journalists to forensic psychologist Gisli Gudjonsson, an expert in false confessions. Howitt begins with Erla Bolladottir, who served prison time for embezzlement and her part in the two murders. She now claims to have no clear memory that any of it every really happened or that any of her testimony was true.

Howitt diligently follows the time frame of events from Einarsson’s disappearance in January 1974 through a second disappearance, arrests, conspiracy theories, accusations, convictions and lengthy appeals over the past forty years. He uses television footage, police crime scene photos, dramatic reconstructions and extensive interviews to piece together a clear-sighted picture of what happened and the many issues that remain a mystery.

In terms of its pacing, focus and ability to condense complex information, Out Of Thin Air starts to resemble a David Fincher film like Zodiac. Staged scenes in the brutal wintry darkness of Iceland add an extra chill as you begin to accept that it is possible to construct a variety of different scenarios around the little that is know about the events in 1974. Those convicted of the murders might be entirely innocent.

Pictured in the media as the embodiment of evil and an Icelandic Charles Manson, the

https://www.screendaily.com/reviews/out-of-thin-air-sheffield-review/5118783.article[24/08/2017 09:42:22]

'Out Of Thin Air': Sheffield Review | Reviews | Screen

late Saevar Ciesielski served the longest sentence and spent his final years a broken man, protesting his innocence and trying to clear his name.

In the end, Out Of Thin Air makes a convincing case that truth and due process were early casualties in the quest for justice. The more information and testimony that Howitt gathers, the less valid the original convictions become. He still leaves many questions and unsolved mysteries but that seems to be the nature of the case and doesn’t detract from a fascinating, satisfying documentary.

Production companies: Mosaic Films, Sagafilm International sales: Mosaic Films andy@mosaicfilms.com Producers: Andy Glynne, Margret Jonasdottir.

Exec producers: Kate Townsend, Lucy McDowell, Skarphéðinn Guðmundsson Cinematography: Bergsteinn Björgúlfsson Editor: Miikka Leskinen Music: Ólafur Arnalds Featuring: Erla Bolladottir, Gisli Gudjonsson, Hordur Johannesson

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Close to the bone: Quacks, the new BBC2 comedy starring Rory Kinnear (second left) and Rupert Everett (left)

John Boland August 20 2017 2:30 AM

A cult of personality has always surrounded psychiatrist Ivor Browne, making it difficult for anyone unfamiliar with his therapy to ascertain what exactly he does for his patients.

I was certainly none the wiser after watching the 90­minute documentary, Meetings with Ivor (RTÉ1), in which we saw the now 88­year­old in session with a succession of celebrity clients and admirers.

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Not that I was surprised at learning so little. This, after all, was "An Alan Gilsenan film" (it said so in the opening credits, in the manner of "A Jean­Luc Godard film" or "A Quentin Tarantino film") and it was full of those ostentatious visual quirks that tell you more about the film's maker than about its supposed subject.

So Browne can't be blamed for the piecemeal nature of this posturingly reverential profile, from which we gleaned next to nothing about his theories or methods, beyond the fact that he has espoused the use of drugs in treating psychological and emotional traumas and believes that patients must be helped to unlock their own demons rather than be "treated" or "cured" in the traditional manner.

How he does this, though, wasn't explained in a film that spent much of its time showcasing sessions with such luminaries as comedian Tommy Tiernan, singer Mary Coughlan, novelist Sebastian Barry, playwright Tom Murphy and journalist Nell McCafferty ­ the last­named berating Browne for being a male chauvinist, though you could see she didn't really mean it and Browne himself chuckled away at her grandstanding antics like a tolerant uncle with a cheeky child.

At the end a young woman who wasn't a celebrity said that Browne's treatment of her trauma "gave me back control over everything", though you never learned what this treatment entailed in a film that was far too pleased with itself (and the participants with themselves) to bother with conveying basic information.

However, the treatment meted out in the first episode of Quacks (BBC2) was both unmistakeable and explicit ­ a leg sawn off near the outset and a tracheotomy performed just before the end. Did I mention that Quacks is a comedy series? Well, it is if you define comedy as something that elicits the occasional titter rather than any outright laughs.

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Here Rory Kinnear plays a dashingly up­himself Victorian surgeon who performs flamboyant public operations while his neglected wife lusts after his clueless best friend.

It's hard to see what James Wood, who also created the so­so Rev, is aiming at here, though it might develop a tone of its own, especially if it gives more screen time to Rupert Everett, who was splendidly arrogant as the hospital boss.

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was one of Agatha Christie's most celebrated mysteries, though it occasioned Edmund Wilson's famous essay 'Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?' in which the great American critic declared his disdain for crime novels that were based on the mechanics of plot rather than revelations of character.

That's what makes most of them unmemorable (pick up old thrillers, and you usually can't recall if you've read them before) and it's what I felt while watching I Know Who You Are (BBC4), which came to the end of its five­week run last weekend.

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This Spanish series was brilliantly plotted, with twists and turns that kept you watching, yet it was all about plot and despite a riveting central performance from Francesc Garrido, you didn't really care about any of these people ­ in the way that you care even about villainous characters in Fargo or Happy Valley or Better Call Saul. And so even though the series ended on a cliffhanger, with more episodes soon to come, I found myself not caring what fresh twists the scriptwriters have conjured up for future viewing.

Nor, after its first episode, did I care how Valkyrien (Channel 4) might develop. Much­ hyped in pre­publicity, this Norwegian series had a somewhat bonkers premise ­ disaffected medic sets up surgical theatre in disused metro station where he funds his dying wife's treatment by taking on criminal clients ­ and went nowhere interesting with it.

However, those who thought otherwise can binge­watch the entire series on Channel 4's digital offshoot, All 4.

Meanwhile, Francis Brennan's Grand Vietnamese Tour (RTÉ1) came to an end, its 12 participants raving about their host and about the brilliant time they'd all had. That was nice to hear, even though evidence of their great time must have been left on the cutting­room floor because what the viewer mostly heard was whingeing about heat, food and various other discomforts.

Even the host wasn't averse to griping, dismissing a huge floating market as "like Tesco on water" and yelling at a passing boat that was playing music "Turn that thing off!

Terrible!" I'd have liked to hear the boatman's view.

Vietnam's geography and history fared no better than its inhabitants. "What do you know about the Mekong Delta?" Francis asked student Sophie as they were about to embark on it. "Nothing", she replied. "Did you even hear of it?" he asked. "No", she said.

I give up.

No space, alas, to talk about three excellent documentaries. North Korea: Murder in the Family (BBC2) concerned the killing of Kim Jong­un's half­brother Kim Jong­nam, at Kuala Lumpur airport last February and the two young women who were duped into taking the fall for it. Storyville: Out of Thin Air (BBC4) was about a dreadful miscarriage of justice in Iceland.

And Seven Days in Summer: Countdown to Partition (BBC2) concerned the calamitous division of India in 1947. Catch them if they come up again.

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Quercus wins three­way auction for Icelandic crime

Quercus wins three­way auction for Icelandic crime Published August 16, 2017 by Heloise Wood

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Quercus’ upmarket imprint riverrun has acquired a true crime book about “bizarre Icelandic disappearances” by a BBC producer following a three­way auction.

The publisher's commissioning editor Richard Arcus bought UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, to Out of Thin Air: The True Story Of An Impossible Murder In Iceland by Anthony Adeane from Juliet Mahony at Lutyens & Rubinstein. It will be published in hardback on 3rd May 2018.

Current affairs producer Adeane created the BBC4 Storyville documentary, "Out of Thin Air: Murder in Iceland", which aired on Monday (14th August) following his three­year investigation.

The book explores the mysterious 1974 Gudmundur and Geirfinnur disappearances after which six people confessed to violent murders they had not committed. It traces the “bizarre and baffling developments” that continue to unfold today while considering the cultural, political and socioeconomic shifts seen in Iceland over the last four decades.

Adeane was responsible for pitching, researching and assistant­producing the show for the BBC. He spent three years visiting Iceland, interviewing those involved and building a network of contacts including the main suspects, the police who first investigated the disappearances and the journalists who initially involved the story.

Arcus said the title “blends solid research with liquid storytelling” and is aimed at those searching for “their next true crime fix”.

He said: “As a slavish devotee to literary true crime, and endlessly fascinated by foreign countries, Out Of Thin Air is as up my street as it gets. A true crime episode that looks at an interesting, closed society through the light of a tragedy, it belongs next to Richard Lloyd Parry's People Who Eat Darkness [Vintage] and Åsne Seierstad's One of Us [Virago].

“Anthony Adeane blends solid research with liquid storytelling, making this book the essential destination for those seeking their next true crime fix.”

Quercus launched the fiction and non­fiction imprint, riverrun, in March 2016 to showcase "high quality literary fiction, upmarket crime and top class, serious non­fiction". rights

Anthony Adeane

Juliet Mahony

Lutyens & Rubinstein

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'Out of Thin Air': Film Review | Hot Docs 2017 - RR-Magazine

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‘Out of Thin Air’: Film Review | Hot Docs 2017

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By RR Magazine  Published on May 11, 2017 LIFE STYLE

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Dylan Howitt’s documentary recounts the complex story of Iceland’s most notorious murder case.

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The continuing craze for Scandinavian crime fiction should benefit Dylan Howitt’s documentary about Iceland’s most

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infamous murder case. Chronicling a convoluted tale, the truth of

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which may never be known for certain, Out of Thin Air is a stylishly executed but narratively muddled effort that confounds as much as it engrosses. Recently given its world premiere at Toronto’s Hot Docs, the film should find especially receptive

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audiences on cable and streaming services.

http://rr-magazine.com/2017/05/11/out-of-thin-air-film-review-hot-docs-2017/[24/08/2017 10:15:44]

'Out of Thin Air': Film Review | Hot Docs 2017 - RR-Magazine

The film concerns the 1974 disappearances of two unrelated men whose bodies were never found. The first, an 18-year-old man, vanished on a wintry night after attending a party. Months later, a 32-year-old father received a late-night phone call, drove to a café, parked his car and was never seen again.

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Suspicions fell on a group of young people including Erla Bolladottir and her boyfriend Saevar Ciesielski, who had

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previously been involved in an embezzling scheme. Along with four of their friends, they were accused by the police and subjected to intense marathon interrogations that resulted in their confessions. All were sent to prison, with Saever, who had been described as “evil incarnate” and compared in the media to Charles Manson, receiving the longest sentence. After their release years later, it came out that they had essentially been tortured and that their confessions may have been built on false memories.

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The film vividly captures the country’s innocent atmosphere at the

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time of the horrific crimes and how shocked the Icelandic people were by the sudden intrusion of the “big bad world,” as one commentator puts it, into their peaceful lives. The nation became riveted by the trial, and everyone seemed to have an opinion about the suspects’ guilt or innocence. And even though the crimes took place more than 40 years ago, the case is still ongoing — the country’s Supreme Court has recently agreed to hear new arguments.

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Director Howitt employs a skillful mixture of archival footage, talking head interviews and gorgeously photographed, dreamlike

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recreations, often redolent of Errol Morris’ The Thin Blue Line.

He particularly focuses on modern-day interviews with Bolladottir, who despite having confessed to shooting one of the victims now steadfastly denies any involvement. Where the film

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runs into trouble is in its recounting of the complex storyline.

Since the truth has so far proven elusive, it makes sense that it raises more questions than it answers. The problem is that situations and characters rush at the viewer in a bewildering blur,

http://rr-magazine.com/2017/05/11/out-of-thin-air-film-review-hot-docs-2017/[24/08/2017 10:15:44]

'Out of Thin Air': Film Review | Hot Docs 2017 - RR-Magazine

and even the questions it raises prove confusing. Long on moody atmosphere but short on narrative coherence, Out of Thin Air ends up being as frustrating as it is haunting.

Production company: Mosaic Films Director: Dylan Howitt Producers: Margaret Jonasdottir, Andy Glynne

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Executive producers: Kate Towsend, Lucy McDowell, Andy Glynne, Laufey Guojonsdottir Director of photography: Bergsteinn Bjorgulfsson Editor: Mikka Leskinen Composer: Olafur Arnalds Venue: Hot Docs 85 minutes

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Did six innocent people confess to a murder they didn’t commit? Why has the case remained unsolved? A new documentary sheds light on the investigation.

On the night of January 26th, 1974 Gudmundur Einarsson, an 18-year-old labourer, went to a dance hall in Hafnarfjordur, a port town 10km south of Reykjavik. When the venue closed at two in the morning he attempted to trek home despite the harsh winds and heavy snow. Two girls driving through the town claimed to have seen Gudmundur and an aggressive drunk attempting to hitchhike.

Later that morning Gudmundur was spotted trying to make his way home alone through the thick snow. According to a witness report, he was heavily intoxicated and fell in front of an oncoming car. This would be the last known sighting of Gudmundur.

When Gudmundur failed to turn up for work he was reported missing. Not suspecting foul play, the police conducted a thorough search. Unable to find any trace of Gudmundur’s whereabouts the file was closed after two weeks pending further evidence.

Ten months later Geirfinnur Einarsson (no relation), a 32 year old digger-driver, returned home from work. A colleague had invited him to go and see a film at the local cinema. Geirfinnur declined the offer, claiming he had to be meet someone later that night. The colleague drove Geirfinnur to a nearby cafe where he bought a packet of cigarettes. Returning home he answered the phone and was heard by his wife saying “I’ve been there already. I’ll be there”. He went out again, drove his car and parked near to the cafe. Geirfinnur was last seen in a phone booth. The keys were left in his car’s ignition waiting for a driver who would never return.

Six petty criminals known to the police for alcohol and drug smuggling became prime suspects in the investigation.

Initially denying any involvement all six would confess to their involvement in a double murder after being broken by lengthy interrogations, repeated bouts of torture and extended periods of solitary confinement.

Attempts to withdraw the statements were dismissed by the Supreme Court.

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To date the police have found no physical evidence of murder.

Halfway through the investigation an embattled government facing a toxic cocktail of the Cod War and a general strike enlisted the services of German “super cop” Karl Schutz to oversee the investigation. Employing a more forceful style of interrogation Schutz extracted fresh confessions that enabled all six to be found guilty for their part in a double murder.

New documentary Out of Thin Air picks up the case and shines a light on this enthralling, enraging, and perplexing tragedy. A real-life Nordic Noir for crime fans yearning to watch something new after Making a Murderer, The Keepers, and The Jinx.

Quentin Bates’ chapter in Truly Criminal: A Crime Writers’ Association Anthology of True Crime provides an exhaustive overview of this case and its continued relevance.

A 2014 BBC World Service documentary interviewed the surviving suspects.

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