"Looking For The Hidden Folk" & "The Seer And The Unseen" with Nancy Marie Brown & Sara Dosa

Learn about the story of Iceland’s hidden folk in a special program with author Nancy Marie Brown and filmmaker Sara Dosa! In celebration of the October 4 release of Brown’s "Looking for the Hidden Folk," a wonderfully quirky new exploration of our interaction with nature from Pegasus Books, she was joined virtually by filmmaker Dosa ("The Seer and the Unseen," Iceland, 2019) for a discussion at Scandinavia House in New York on October 11, 2022. In exploring how Icelanders interact with nature — and their idea that elves live among us — "Looking for the Hidden Folk" discusses how altering our perceptions of the environment can be a crucial first step toward saving it. Looking for answers in history, science, religion, and art — from ancient times to today — Brown finds that each discipline defines what is real and unreal, natural and supernatural, demonstrated and theoretical, alive and inert. Each has its own way of perceiving and valuing the world around us, and each discipline defines what an Icelander might call an elf. Illuminated by her own encounters with Iceland’s Otherworld — from ancient lava fields to holy mountains, to glaciers to the cold desert — and hailed as “astonishing, lyrical, and thought-provoking” (Pat Shipman, author of "Our Oldest Companions"), Brown’s new book offers an intimate conversation about how we look at and find value in nature, and reveals how the words we use and stories we tell shape the world that we see. Winner of the Best Foreign Documentary at the Oslo Independent Film Festival, among others, Sara Dosa's "The Seer and the Unseen" tells the story of an Icelandic grandmother — a real-life Lorax who speaks on behalf of nature under threat. As it is about to be razed by a road construction project, our heroine Ragga fights to save a threatened landscape believed to be home to a community of elves-invisible spirits of nature that over half of Iceland believes in. This road is needless and redundant — a resuscitation of the country’s dogmatic embrace of the ‘invisible hand of the free market,’ which drove Iceland to its spectacular 2008 financial meltdown. Through Ragga’s heroic story, The Seer explores the invisible forces — be they elves or capitalism — that shape our visible worlds and transform our natural landscapes, revealing not only what is worth seeing but what is worth saving. In this evening’s program, Nancy Marie Brown first introduces her book in-person and is then joined remotely by Sara Dosa, as they discuss both of their projects and the themes they explore. Purchase "Looking For the Hidden Folk" here: https://bit.ly/3g4mcdc Learn where to see "The Seer & The Unseen" here: https://www.theseerandtheunseen.com/screenings Learn more about programming at Scandinavia House at www.scandinaviahouse.org #iceland #elves #booktalk