Ìý He's four foot high, covered in fur, and he speaks in a strange language. Could he be a demon or is he, as one of the villagers suggests, a flying polar bear? As we quickly realize, this furry little bundle isn't some hellish offspring but a lost Eskimo boy, Ikingut (Nakinge), who's wandered over the frozen ice from Greenland.
Befriending 11-year-old Boas (Jónsson), even though neither of them speaks the same language, Ikingut brings his Inuit knowledge of igloo building and ice-fishing to the starving fishermen. But they're so convinced that this innocent-looking child is a monster, they want to have him thrown into the local prison.
For all its talk of God, this isolated community is actually riddled with ignorant superstition. Ignoring the minister's advice not to turn from Christianity to "sorcery, spirits, and witchcraft" in the dark days of the Icelandic winter, the locals are so influenced by pompous fisherman Thorkel, who claims to have intimate knowledge of the black arts, that they're willing to victimize a harmless child.
As director Gisli Snær Erlingsson makes clear, even the kindest of these characters are ignorant - Boas' mother bathes the young Eskimo and tries to scrub his dark skin back to pale white, thinking that he's covered in grime.
Fortunately, Ikingut is light-hearted enough to forgive them their faults, and it's this easy-going comedy that makes the film so enjoyable.
Whether watching Boas come face to face with the "demon" or the local fishermen building umbrella hats to fend off the "flying polar bears", this quirky children's movie has a wonderful sense of how ridiculous its self-righteous characters really are.
In Icelandic with English subtitles.
