1:20 Bastiaan Van Aarle: Bastiaan van Aarle

Olafsfjoerdur is a fishing village in northern Iceland. Like many Icelandic villages it consists of houses with roofs made of corrugated metal sheets, a church in the harbor, a few shops, a petrol station, a fish factory, a swimming pool and a school. All of this is surrounded by snowy mountaintops, rivers that meander through valleys, the sea crashing against cliffs and sheep in the hills. One of the remarkable things in Iceland is that the sun doesn’t set during summer. Because of Olafsfjoerdur’s northern orientation the sun touches the horizon on the first of July and goes immediately back up again after that. The sun sinks more and more the following days until the nights return. This book visualizes this change in light: these thirty-one images, each taken at 01:20 AM, represent the darkest moment of every day in the month of July. At the same time, 01:20 is also a documentary about a small fishing village, seclusion and everyday life, romance and roughness-an alternative to today’s globalized world.