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Research dossier · Arts & Letters

A White, White Day

2019 film by Hlynur Pálmason

Manuscripts, fine bindings, an engraving plate and preserved performance ephemera
Arts and lettersInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionDec 21, 2024
Entity authorityQ63352722 ↗
Source-derived summary

A White, White Day (Icelandic: Hvítur, Hvítur Dagur) is a 2019 Icelandic drama film directed by Hlynur Pálmason. It premiered in the Critics' Week section at the Cannes Film Festival on 16 May 2019. It won Best Film Award at the 2019 Torino Film Festival. It was selected as the Icelandic entry for the Best International Feature Film at the 92nd Academy Awards, but it was not nominated.

Plot

Police chief Ingimundur, whose wife died in a car accident, reluctantly undergoes grief counselling. He works constantly on renovating a farm building for his daughter Elín's family, and sometimes looks after her daughter Salka.

After Elín gives him some of her mother's effects, he's shocked to find a video evidently recording an affair she had with a man called Olgeir Olafsson. He stakes out Olgeir's home and joins his football club. Bad weather closes the roads; while having a pixelated online therapy session, Ingimundur snaps and trashes the room, beating up two colleagues when they protest and locking them in the cells. Insulting his granddaughter Salka to get rid of her, he kidnaps Olgeir and takes him at gunpoint to a grave he's dug.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “A White, White Day” is 2019 film by Hlynur Pálmason. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through White, film and Hlynur, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewBest approached as a cultural-object dossier: authorship and date matter, but circulation and reception often explain the wider significance. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—2019—that can be checked directly. The authority record carries competing date values—2019, 2020-02-20, 2019-10-31—which should remain separate until their references and qualifiers are resolved. For this dossier, White, film and Hlynur is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “2019 film by Hlynur Pálmason” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 21, 2024. The linked authority identifier is Q63352722. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2019.

Critical limits

Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Separate the work, its editions or performances, and its later reception. Catalogue records, publication histories and object files often preserve different parts of that story.

Best used for
  • Identifying works and editions
  • Tracing reception history
  • Finding collection records
Verify next

The original object or edition, catalogue raisonné, performance record, rights file and holding institution.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “A White, White Day”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow A White, White Day primary sources, A White, White Day archive and White research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “A White, White Day”?
  2. Which edition, object, performance or recording is being described?
  3. Where is authorship, date or provenance documented?
Subject index

Search terms from this dossier

Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “A White, White Day” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.