New Documentary Chronicles Iceland’s Feminist Revolution

In 1975, 90 percent of Icelandic women went on strike, refusing to perform any professional or household labor, and gathered together at over 20 rallies across the country to demonstrate for gender equality.

It was the largest demonstration in Icelandic history at that time, and its reverberations were magnificent. Within one year, Iceland passed its first Gender Equality Act. Within five, the world’s first democratically elected female head of state assumed the Icelandic presidency. And for the last 16 years, Iceland has been recognized as the world’s most gender-equal nation by the World Economic Forum.

The Women’s Day Off continues to inspire women in Iceland — and now, thanks in large part to the 2025 feature-length documentary The Day Iceland Stood Still, feminists worldwide are also taking notes.

The captivating and inspiring documentary, directed by Pamela Hogan and produced by Hrafnhildur “Hrabba” Gunnarsdóttir, has been screening at embassies around the world this year to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Women’s Day Off, as part of an initiative from Iceland’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. “The response has been incredible,” Hogan shared during a screening in Reykjavik on the eve of this year’s strike anniversary. “What we hear over and over from audiences is: ‘I needed to hear this story, and here’s how I’m using it now.’”

In Japan, activists who have formed their own strike committee are using the film to organize. In Dublin, Ireland, organizations are using the film to try and get more women to run for office. In Germany, a screening so energized one viewer that she faced her fear of flying to visit Iceland with her family. In Seoul, South Korea, a crowd of women who are bucking tradition by cutting their hair short and choosing to remain single were taking notes during a screening, scribbling weaponized humor and compromise down on paper.

The ten-year journey to bringing The Day Iceland Stood Still to audiences worldwide began when Hogan, an American, found herself similarly engrossed with this particular piece of Icelandic history. She first learned about the Day Off during a family trip in 2015, through “a tiny little article in the back of the Lonely Planet guide.” When she found out the Republic’s broad equality for women “had to do with something these amazing women did back in 1975, my head exploded,” Hogan shared in an interview. “I came home and I couldn’t stop talking about it, and my friend Kathy said, ‘You’re going to shut up, you’re going to write a proposal, and my company is going to give you some money.’”

The story was a perfect fit for Hogan, an Emmy award–winning documentarian who was raised a feminist and has made a career out of uplifting women’s voices on screen. In the stories Icelandic women share in the film, she sees shades of her mother’s own organizing for the Equal Rights Amendment. “This story really reminds us that ordinary women can do extraordinary things,” Hogan asserted during our interview. “They didn’t have one particularly gifted leader who was a great orator or charismatic. They did it together, just ordinary women.”

After working on the project for a year with an all-American team, Hogan connected with Gunnarsdóttir, an Icelandic filmmaker known for telling feminist stories who, in 2024, was honored with the Falcon Award, Iceland’s highest national honor for an individual. “All the Icelanders were telling me: Well, you’re going to meet with Hrabba, right?” she recalled. “You’re going to meet with Hrabba Gunarsdóttir, right?”

“It was interesting to think about having an outsider do the film,” Gunnarsdóttir said during our interview. Although she initially feared Hogan’s helming of the project might invite criticism, “it turned out that Pam’s enthusiasm in the interviews just really inspired the women.”

“There were stories that came out during the shoots that were amazing, because people were telling this to a foreigner, and the foreigner knew nothing,” Gunnarsdóttir added. “I experienced the same thing when my father died, and my mother was sitting with a friend of mine from America and was telling her stories that I had never heard before about my father.”

“One person would tell you about another and another,” Hogan laughed. “I would always go on a scout and just start having coffee with somebody that somebody said might have a story, and then they would say, ‘well, actually it’s my mother you should talk to,’ or ‘actually it’s my next door neighbor.’ I really drank a lot of coffee finding these people!”

Hogan’s favorite interview was a group conversation with a crowd of women who had protested a beauty contest in the years before the Day Off, bringing in a cow in a now-infamous demonstration. “When these women got together, the crew and I were in the living room, setting up lights and trying to figure out how to make it look,” Hogan remembered. “They were all in the kitchen, having the time of their lives. They hadn’t all gathered together since this thing that they did so many years ago, having coffee, making each other laugh, showing each other archival things that they pulled out of a drawer. ‘Oh, I drew a picture of the cow.’ ‘You’re kidding.’ By the time we sat down at the table for them to tell the story … they had triggered each other’s memories, and it just became a wonderfully rich, nuanced evoking of that day.”

Hogan and Gunnarsdóttir also worked to collect as much archival footage as possible — rescuing and recovering, in the process, footage that was set to be erased or had never been preserved. “The women, most of them, didn’t have cameras — and the ones that did were like, ‘Oh, gee. I thought later I should have brought my camera along the day that we entered the cow in the beauty contest,’” Hogan explained.

“We found out that our state TV, RUV, had only kept 15 minutes of everything that they filmed that day in those times,” Gunnarsdóttir recalled. “They were just saving space, reusing the cassettes.” Hogan and Gunnarsdóttir made good use of those 15 minutes, as well as 10 minutes of footage from a Redstockings meeting, shot on Super 8 by a member, and another 10, in color, that Hogan found, undeveloped, in an archive.

Stories that couldn’t be told through live footage were brought to life by animated illustrations, which infuse the film with a dreamlike spirit. Gunnarsdóttir explained that the animations “gave us creative control, which we wouldn’t have had if we had been trying to piece it together from photographs or archival footage.”

“It’s more colorful, it’s more fun,” Hogan emphasized. ”I also feel like it picks up on the playfulness of the women’s movement.”

Over the course of the project, Hogan and Gunnarsdóttir had to change course several times. There were setbacks during the COVID-19 pandemic, which shut off international travel, and in 2023, as the team was in the process of editing, another strike was organized, changing their plans and their closing shots. This year, The Day Iceland Stood Still finally had its world premiere at Hot Docs in Toronto — providing a much-needed sense of feminist possibility in a moment of rising authoritarianism, male supremacy, and antifeminist backlash worldwide.

On the eve of this year’s strike anniversary, women leaders from across the globe saluted the filmmakers and Iceland’s leaders for providing such inspiration and modeling a different way forward.

“We have seen the efforts taken over the years to keep gender equality in the forefront,” declared Sandra Mason, the president of Barbados, in a video address that played after the film was screened to a packed room in Reykjavik’s Bio Paradis. “The journey is long and sometimes arduous, but Icelanders have demonstrated that progress is achievable.”

“As we pause after 50 years to commemorate the action of these bold women of Iceland, we will forever remain indebted to their vigor and determination as we march on for the next 50 years,” added Lucia Witbooi, vice president of the Republic of Namibia. “Let us, as women in leadership, support each other to close the gender gap that still exists in some of our countries ... Let us ensure that our actions and voices serve as the source of inspiration for the girl child to reach their maximum potential.”

“As we jointly celebrate Iceland’s legacy, we also renew our common mission to ensure that every single girl in every country can grow up free to dream, to choose, and to lead,” echoed Vjosa Osmani-Sadriu, president of Kosovo. “True equality is a responsibility we carry together, and it is through solidarity among women everywhere that we can turn that responsibility into lasting change.”

“We are mothers, daughters, sisters, and dreamers, and we are leaders together,” said Mary Simon, governor general of Canada. “Let us continue designing a world where every voice is heard and every generation can thrive.”

“I’m seeing people’s eyes and hearts open up when we share this story,” Icelandic president Halla Tómasdóttir remarked that evening, “and it gives them hope that they too can impact this terribly broken world of ours and get it onto a more positive path … people actually are looking to us to show what is possible.”

The Day Iceland Stood Still was honored with an Audience Award at the Mill Valley Film Festival, the Peter Wintonick Audience Award at Thessaloniki Film Festival, Special Mention for Best Film on Politics at the Czech Republic’s Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival, Best Documentary at Canada’s Victoria Film Festival, Audience Choice Award at Gimli International Film Festival, and the Documentary Prize at Germany’s Nordische Filmtage Lübeck. It was also nominated for the Magnolia Award by the Shanghai International TV Festival and is in the running now for an Edda Award by the Icelandic Film and Television Academy.

Despite its accolades, however, and its success in theaters, on television, and through streaming platforms in countries including Spain, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland (and licenses in Poland, Belgium, Latvia, Norway, and Estonia), The Day Iceland Stood Still hasn’t yet secured distribution in the U.S. Hogan said that political attacks on PBS even interrupted a plan earlier this year to screen the film on its affiliates for Women’s History Month.

It’s a sticking point for the filmmakers, both of whom have lived in America. “Our feminist movement made great gains,” Hogan explained to the crowd in Reykjavik on the eve of their strike’s 50th anniversary, “but then we stalled to the point where we’re the only developed country now where there isn’t even one day of guaranteed, paid maternal leave when a woman has a baby. We’re number 43 on the gender equality scale.”

“We want to make sure that the film is seen in America,” Gunnarsdóttir emphasized during our interview. “America really needs this film.”

Right now, U.S. organizations and groups can screen the film for a “humble fee” by getting in touch with the team to organize big or small events. (There are still screenings happening globally, including some in the U.S.) The morning we spoke, Hogan excitedly reported that she’d been receiving emails from League of Women Voters chapters across the country.

“We know there’s a real hunger here,” Hogan added. “This isn’t old history, something you should know. It’s something that people are taking into their lives right now as urgently relevant.”