What the Reykjavik Talent Lab Gave Me — Notes from an Essay Filmmaker.
By Matan Tal
In 2018, I attended the Reykjavik Talent Lab, a filmmaker development program running alongside the Reykjavik International Film Festival. I want to write about it honestly — which means writing about both what was genuinely good and what quietly disappointed me, in retrospect, more than I expected.
The lab brought together filmmakers from around the world. The States, UK, Spain, Germany, Korea, India and more. Different levels of experience, different kinds of work. The kind of mix that makes you feel, for a few days, that the world of independent cinema is smaller and more connected than it usually feels from your desk.
We had a masterclass with Laila Pakalniņa — a genuinely interesting session, with her films providing the context for a conversation. We had panels with local Icelandic filmmakers. We had time at the festival itself, in venues that felt like the right places to watch films — dark rooms in a city that seems designed for interior life.
And then there was the Zoom session with Jonas Mekas.
Mekas was in his nineties. He was calm. Unhurried. Very Zen. He spoke the way someone speaks when they've already said everything urgent and are now just enjoying the conversation. It was, I later learned, one of his last public appearances. At the time I didn't know that. I just knew that something in the room — even a virtual room — went quiet in a particular way. The kind of quiet that means people are paying attention differently.
That session alone was worth the trip.
So here is the grain of salt.
After the lab ended, the festival disappeared. Not literally — it still runs every year. But as far as my relationship with it was concerned, it was over. No follow-up. No alumni network. No interest in what I made next.
When I finished a new project — as did other fellow lab alumni I stayed in touch with — the festival showed no particular care. No invitation to submit. No discount on accreditation. No mention of alumni status anywhere on their website. If you go to their site today, you won't find a list of past participants. You won't find the films we went on to make. There is no record that we were ever there, except in our own memories.
I don't think this is malicious. I think it's structural negligence — the difference between a festival that runs a talent lab because it believes in long-term relationships with filmmakers, and a festival that runs one because it's a mark of quality, a line in the press kit. A badge.
Compare this to almost any other talent lab attached to a serious festival. The alumni pages. The continued programming. The sense that attending means something beyond the week itself. Berlinale Talents — which Reykjavik's lab was apparently once connected to, before going independent — maintains exactly this kind of infrastructure. The separation may have cost them more than they realized.
What I came away with, I came away with on my own.
The friendships I made are still real. I still have close relationships with a good number of the filmmakers I met that week. We follow each other's work. We share things. That didn't come from the institution — it came from the people in the room, which is ultimately where it always comes from.
The memory of Jonas Mekas on a screen, unhurried, speaking about cinema the way you speak about something you've lived inside for decades — that stayed with me too. Not because the festival preserved it. Because I did.
If you're considering the Reykjavik Talent Lab: go. Iceland alone justifies it. The conversations are real. The films they show are interesting and the venues are worth sitting in. There's a chance you'll be in a room with someone extraordinary.
Just don't expect the festival to remember you afterward. Build the relationships yourself, directly, with the people sitting next to you. That's where the value actually lives — and it turns out, that's enough.
