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Noi the Albino

Noi the Albino (Icelandic: Nói albinói ( pronunciation )) is an Icelandic film by director Dagur Kári released in 2003. The film explores the life of teenage outsider Nói (played by Tómas Lemarquis) in a remote fishing village in western Iceland. It won multiple awards.

Nói albinói was filmed in Bolungarvik (pop. 957), a fishing village in the far northwest of Iceland, located on the Westfjords peninsula.

The moody original musical score is from the director's band, Slowblow.

The Los Angeles Times' Kenneth Turan called the movie "singular enough to have swept the Eddas, the Icelandic Academy Awards" and noted that it was a selection in "dozens of film festivals." Skye Sherwin of the BBC called it "a coming-of-age tale, bound between grinding humdrum and exquisite surrealism."

Plot

Nói Kristmundsson is a 17-year-old living in a small unnamed remote fishing village in western Iceland with his grandmother Lína (Anna Friðriksdóttir). His father Kiddi (Þröstur Leó Gunnarsson), an alcoholic taxi driver, also lives in town, but Nói appears to have a distant relationship with him. As an alopecia totalis his appearance is strikingly different from others in the village. Much of his time is spent either wandering the desolate town, at the town bookstore, or in a hidden cellar at his grandmother's house, which serves as his private sanctuary. The town is a sort of purgatory for Nói, surrounded by mountains and attainable only by boat during the winter, when the roads through the mountain passes are snowed over. There are signs that Nói is highly intelligent, but he is totally uninterested in school and seems to have an adversarial relationship with the faculty, particularly his math teacher. More often than not he cuts class to go to the local gas station, where he frequently breaks into the slot machine and rigs it for an assured jackpot. The bleak town seem to offer few prospects for the future, and Nói doesn't seem to fit in there.

Dwarf (mythology)

In Germanic mythology, a dwarf is a being that dwells in mountains and in the earth, and is variously associated with wisdom, smithing, mining, and crafting. Dwarfs are often also described as short and ugly, although some scholars have questioned whether this is a later development stemming from comical portrayals of the beings. The concept of the dwarf has had influence in modern popular culture and appears in a variety of media.

Etymology and usage

The modern English noun dwarf descends from the Old English dweorg. It has a variety of cognates in other Germanic languages, including Old Norse dvergr and Old High German twerg. According to Vladimir Orel, the English noun and its cognates ultimately descend from Proto-Germanic *đwerȝaz.

Beyond the Proto-Germanic reconstruction, the etymology of the word dwarf is highly contested. By way of historical linguistics and comparative mythology, scholars have proposed theories about the origins of the being, including that dwarfs may have originated as nature spirits, as beings associated with death, or as a mixture of concepts. Competing etymologies include a basis in the Indo-European root *dheur- (meaning 'damage'), the Indo-European root *dhreugh (whence, for example, modern English dream and German Trug 'deception'), and comparisons have been made with Sanskrit dhvaras (a type of "demonic being").