A well-crafted thriller with emotional heft and commercial appeal, Wolka stands as testimony to the talent of the late director Arni Olafur Asgeirsson (Brim, Ploeey), a graduate of Poland’s Lodz Film School, and to the lives of Iceland’s largest minority population, immigrants from Poland. It begins as Anna (Olga Boladz), sporting tattoos and oozing attitude, is released after 15 years in a Polish prison. She returns to her rundown Warsaw neighborhood and starts looking for a woman named Dorota. But Dorota is nowhere to be found – not in Poland at least. So, Anna almost immediately breaks the terms of her parole and travels to an island off the coast of Iceland with a large Polish migrant community. After she arrives, a feeling of unease spreads; the visitor is disturbing the peace of the community. And it becomes increasingly clear that Anna has an agenda for which she is prepared to sacrifice everything.
Director Biography
The late Árni Ólafur Ásgeirsson was born in 1972 in Reykjavík, Iceland and graduated from Poland’s Lodz Film School. He is the director of the feature films Thicker Than Water (2006), Undercurrent (2010) and Ploey (2018). He was working on Wolka (2021) at the time of his death in April, 2021.