There are few places on Earth more visually striking than the Black Sands of Reynisfjara Beach in Iceland, where tourists flock to take pictures and stand a fool’s chance to be smashed against the rocks by sneaker waves, then drowned at sea. These dangerous and beautiful beaches serve as backdrop for Icelandic showrunner Baldvin Z’s crime thriller series “Black Sands,” which will play at Berlinale Series. Written by Baldvin Z, Ragnar Jónsson, Andri Óttarsson and Aldís Hamilton, the limited series follows disgraced detective Anita (played by Hamilton) as she investigates a series of deaths at the beach while balancing the familial shadows of her past.
The series, produced by Baldvin Z’s own Glassriver, brings a warmth to Nordic Noir not often seen, with scenes of Anita reconnecting and rekindling her hometown connections after expulsion from Reykjavik. Still, the coin flips and the bodies begin to pile up. At times rich and convivial, and other times moody and bleak, “Black Sands” brings the mystery of a family secret alive with addictive pace as Anita and her partner leave no dark stone unturned in search of the truth.
Variety spoke with Baldvin Z ahead of the Berlinale Film Festival.
How did you approach writing “Black Sands” with a new team of collaborators, especially with Hamilton, who stars in the series?
For a long time I really wanted to create a crime series. I had participated in two crime series before but with them I wasn’t developing the series. I just came in and directed.
It started a couple of years ago with Ragnar. He is a policeman here – he’s actually the Icelandic Dexter. He’s not killing people, but he uses this blood analysis. And he’s actually a very famous policeman because he is solving big cases here; he’s making speeches all over the world about blood analysis and stuff like that. So, he and Aldís met in another TV show and they started talking about this project, and when they pitched this idea to me, I sorta felt that this could be it. This could be the project that I would like to participate in.
So after we had created the story, I sat down with Ragnar and Aldís. Aldís kind of came with the project because she was looking for a big role also, to be that police woman, who ever that policewoman might turn out to be. So after we had created the storyline, we just said okay, let’s do it, let’s write it together. It was so nice to have Ragnar on the team because of his knowledge, and so we split up the episodes. Ragnar took all the police stuff. Aldís got to play with her character, with her mother, and I sort of wrote the rest of it. And then I put it all together into episodes and I’d never done this before, but the outcome was, yeah, it was nice.
Family tragedy seems to be a theme in much of your work, including your recent film “Let Me Fall.” Was there something in particular you wanted to say about addiction or alcoholism in this series?
When I did “Let Me Fall,” I was on a mission. No doubt about that. I was on a huge mission just to give Icelanders a wake up call with the opioid addiction here in Iceland, which is taking place all around the world. We were turning a blind eye to it. Those girls were screaming for help and nobody was helping them here. In this series there’s another mission, and of course alcoholism is a part of it, but it’s sort of how family secrets affect people. Things that happened in the family in the past that we thought through the years that it is okay, what had happened then, but it’s not okay, now you see things differently. And of course, if you go through things like that, alcoholism and drug abuse becomes part of it because you are suffering through the years. If you listen to the song that Ragnar sings in the first episode, it says everything about it. It’s talking about the past and secrets and all that.
How did you decide what you wanted to say about family in “Black Sands” while, as the director, balancing against the ever-present need to track the pulse of a murder mystery?
Balancing personal life and professional life was very tricky to figure out, especially in the first three and four episodes. The feeling I wanted to give is that after four episodes, that the audience would just like to participate in the family story and we would put the case behind us, but it will follow us through the whole series. And that is actually what happened when we were showing the TV series here in Iceland, we found. At the beginning, people were a little bit confused – is this a crime series or is it a family story? But when we were into episode three and four and five, people started to want to know more about the family and about their background. But in the first two episodes, the rule was basically let’s do it 50-50.
The series is named for Iceland’s famous beaches. Is there an existing reputation these beaches hold among locals and Icelanders, and how did you come to the decision to make this the setting for your story?
We wanted to go to the most exciting tourist place in Iceland and shoot there because of the tourists and the first murder. These are dangerous beaches. People are sucked out into the water when the waves come up, people are shooting pictures there and they are going too close to the water and you just don’t realize how powerful it is. So we have lost many, many tourists who are just drowned on these beaches. But actually this particular beach that we are shooting on is not the beach that everybody is seeing in the photos. We are shooting just on the other side of a cliff because it is a private beach and tourists are not allowed there. But it’s very, very similar and we were lucky to have COVID going on when we were shooting this because we were shooting at all these tourist places and there were no tourists, so we just had it all to ourselves.
“Black Sands”
© Juliette Rowland / Glassriver