An Emmy award-winning filmmaker, journalist, and media executive, Pamela Hogan’s new feature documentary The Day Iceland Stood Still about the 1975 Icelandic feminist uprising that sparked a revolution is called “A Worldwide Cri de Coeur” by the Globe and Mail, Canada’s newspaper of record. After premiering at Toronto’s Hot Docs film festival, the film has screened at numerous festivals around the world, and honored with Audience Awards at the Mill Valley Film Festival, Thessaloniki Film Festival, and Canada’s Gimli International Film Festival, as well as Best Documentary at Canada’s Victoria Film Festival, the Documentary Prize at Germany’s Nordische Filmtage Lübeck, and Special Mention for Best Film on Politics at the Czech Republic’s Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival.

Her independent film Looks Like Laury Sounds Like Laury was hailed as one of “The Best TV Shows of 2015” by The New York Times.

She was Co-creator and Executive Producer of the groundbreaking PBS series Women War & Peace, for which she directed the episode I Came to Testify about the Bosnian women who changed international law by testifying about wartime rape for the first time in history. Seen by 12 million viewers on U.S. television, the films won the Overseas Press Clubs’ Edward R. Murrow Award for best TV documentary on international affairs and Robert Spiers Benjamin Award for best reporting in any medium on Latin America, as well a Television Academy Honor; and Hogan’s I Came to Testify was awarded the ABA’s Silver Gavel for excellence in fostering the American public’s understanding of law.

She was formerly Executive Producer of PBS’s acclaimed international affairs series Wide Angle, working closely with global filmmakers on over 70 hours of character-driven documentaries illuminating under-reported stories. While there she originated and shaped development of the Emmy-winning Ladies First, about women’s leadership in post-genocide Rwanda; and she launched Time for School, following the lives of 7 children in 7 countries who are fighting against the odds to stay in school (Gabriel Award, Overseas Press Club citation, IDA nominee).

Hogan is an honoree of the National Council for Research on Women’s Making a Difference for Women award.

A graduate of Harvard University, she holds a Master’s in Journalism from Columbia University where she is an adjunct professor in the Master’s Documentary Program.

Learn more:

• Don’t miss our Inkandescent interview with Pam and fellow filmmaker Hrafnhildur Gunnarsdóttir on Inkandescent.tv
• Explore thedayicelandstoodstill.com
• Watch the trailer!
• Check out our Q&A with the filmmakers on Inkandescent.us
• Scroll down for our interview with Pamela!

---

Film producer Pamela Hogan on “The Day Iceland Stood Still!” 

What made you want to make this movie: When I read about the story in the back pages of the Lonely Planet guide on a family trip to Iceland, my head exploded. I just thought, how can I NOT know this story? Then I thought of the words of Irish civil rights activist Bernadette Devlin: “It’s not that women are written OUT of history—it’s that we’re never written IN.” I didn’t have a choice. I knew I had to make the film, and it has been an incredible journey.”

What were the biggest challenges? Fundraising, of course. But on the creative side, one of the biggest challenges was finding archival footage—photos and film—to bring this 1970s moment of history to life. Most of the women didn’t have cameras, and those that did had said to me things like, “I don’t know why I didn’t think to bring my camera along when we entered the cow in the beauty contest.”

We have to realize this was not the era of selfies! Another challenge was finding a way to bring ordinary people—women and men —who were not activists but just living their lives—into the story. We wanted to paint a collective picture of Icelandic society in the early days of the 1970s women’s movement, and none of those people were on the record in any way, so it took a lot of research, a lot of cups of coffee with a lot of people, to find those voices.

Another huge challenge, she shares, was finding a way to convey the incredible pressure and criticism ICELAND’s 1970s feminist pioneers faced every day. “Today, Icelandic society has changed so fundamentally that either people don’t remember how much they scorned the feminist movement and the push for gender equality, or they don’t want to remember. So we ended up bringing in actors to voice critical editorials that appeared in the newspapers at the time.”

I think I’m most excited by the discovery that Iceland‘s feminists used humor to open people’s ears to their truly subversive message. I would even say they weaponized humor — and that made it a lot of fun to tell this story! And perhaps what I’m most proud of is that the women who shared their stories with us are happy with the film and feel that it truthfully conveys the spirit of their incredible movement.

Why do you think the women of Iceland were able to come together — and can others do the same today?

Well, it helps that October 24, 1975, was a sunny day, because that’s when the winds can be blowing so hard that roads are closed, and no one would’ve been able to come to the demonstration. I guess that’s why one woman’s son remarked, “Now I know that God is a woman!” Part of it, too, was that women in so many countries around the world in the early 1970s were coming together and fighting for change. As one of the Icelandic activists said to us, “We had sisters all over the place“. So there was a sense of joining a global movement whose time had truly come. Another key was the radical feminists’ willingness to compromise and call it a “day off “rather than a strike. Although some were disappointed and angry about the compromise and felt that it was a sellout, in the end, it’s why truly every Icelandic woman could participate that day, because the message was simply “we matter “.