Policing the Screen, Screening the Policed: Immigrant Representation, Surveillance, and Racial Capitalism in Icelandic Cinema

This article develops an anthropological reading of immigrant representation in Icelandic cinema through the lens of racial capitalism. Focusing on Ísold Uggadóttir's Andið eðlilega / And Breathe Normally (2018), alongside Tryggð / The Deposit (2019), Gullregn (2020), Kona fer í stríð / Woman at War (2018), Ikíngut (2000), Ófærð / Trapped (2015–), and a wider corpus of films and series, it argues that recent Icelandic audio-visual production renders visible the surveillance and policing infrastructures through which racialised mobility is governed at the Nordic periphery. The film analysis is brought into dialogue with empirical research on police–minority relations in Iceland, which documents perceptions of bias and procedural injustice among persons of colour and migrants, and with scholarship on whiteness, Nordic exceptionalism, and crimmigration in the wider region. Drawing on a small but theoretically informed film corpus and a typology of immigrant subjectivities, the article shows how cinematic framings of asylum seekers, Indigenous children, low-budget tourists and migrant workers both reproduce and contest Icelandic narratives of innocence. The article concludes with policy implications for anti-racist reform of Icelandic border and policing practices, and for public support of migrant-centred film-making.