Will Húsavík Earn an “Óskar”?

Residents of an Icelandic village have launched an Academy Award campaign for the ballad, from the Will Ferrell movie “Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga,” that is now the real town’s anthem.

Húsavík (population twenty-three hundred) is a fishing village on the northern coast of Iceland. Its chief industry is tourism: whale-watching (the town calls itself the Whale Capital of Iceland), a microbrewery, geothermal baths. In the winter, you can see the northern lights. “We really can’t complain, except that there are too few of us here—we need more people,” the town’s mayor, Kristján Þór Magnússon, said recently. His duties normally include meeting with school principals and sorting out staffing with the fire chief. But in 2019 Húsavík welcomed the Netflix comedy “Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga” for four days of filming. “No drones are to be operated over or around the set,” Magnússon warned citizens. But he couldn’t help feeling starstruck himself. Recalling a shoot at a local cemetery, he said, “If somebody had told me that I would be sitting at my grandmother’s grave with Will Ferrell and Pierce Brosnan, I don’t know what I would have thought!”

The movie tells the story of two Húsavík musicians (“probably not” siblings), Lars and Sigrit, played by Ferrell and Rachel McAdams, who represent Iceland at the Eurovision contest after the country’s other contestants are killed in a boat explosion. They bumble their way to the finals, where they perform a half-silly, half-stirring ballad called “Húsavík (My Hometown).” (“Where the mountains sing through the screams of seagulls.”) When the movie came out, last June, the town was elated, although COVID dampened the celebration. “We had planned a huge screening here at the sports hall, which we couldn’t do,” Magnússon said. “But I think every single person, whether at kindergarten or the elderly home, was watching the first day.” The song became a town anthem: “Late at night, if you opened your window, you could hear people singing out of the bar.” Last month, a group of townsfolk released a video called “An Óskar for Húsavík,” in which a fictional resident named Óskar Óskarsson lobbies for an Academy Award. It was the kind of publicity even Netflix can’t buy—and it paid off. “Húsavík” was nominated for Best Original Song, and Magnússon has set aside funds for more grassroots campaigning.

“Having an anthem like this, it’s priceless,” the mayor said, on Zoom. He was joined by the three nominated songwriters: Savan Kotecha, Rickard Göransson, and Fat Max Gsus. Magnússon, who was meeting them for the first time, wore glasses and a gray sweater; the songwriters all had shaggy hair and beards. They were delighted to hear how their song had transformed the town. “The kids at school sing it,” Magnússon told them. “That’s probably the coolest thing ever,” Gsus said, as the trio giggled.

Kotecha, an American pop composer who has written for Katy Perry and One Direction, was the film’s executive music producer. For the climactic number, he corralled two Swedish collaborators, Göransson (with whom he worked on the Ariana Grande hit “God Is a Woman”) and Gsus (“a new guy in our whole Swedish mafia”), to write something that could pass for a real Eurovision power ballad while also being a parody of one. “We needed this song to be the heartbeat of the movie,” Kotecha said. They went through more than sixty versions, with an Icelandic verse rendered via Google Translate. “Early on,” Gsus said, “I tried to put together the most complicated, longest Icelandic village name that I could think of, and it came to be Kirkjubæjarklaustursteingrímsfjarðarheiðiarstaðal.” Ultimately, the filmmakers settled on Húsavík, which was both scenic and easier to pronounce than, say, Seyðisfjörður.

“My need to cry has given way to a need to laugh. But it could flip back anytime.”
Cartoon by Victoria Roberts

None of the songwriters had visited Húsavík, but they drew on their love of their own home towns. Kotecha spent his teen-age years in Austin, where he discovered music and started a boy band. Gsus is from Karlskrona, a Swedish coastal city, and Göransson grew up nearby, in Växjö. As for Magnússon, he was born in Húsavík in 1979 and studied public health in the United States; he was teaching at the University of Iceland, in Reykjavík, when he was recruited to be the mayor of Húsavík, in 2014.

The town is planning to capitalize on its global fame—which will surely grow when the song is performed at the Oscars—with a summer tourism campaign. There’s now a Jaja Ding Dong pub, named for another song from the movie, and a replica of the tiny elf houses from the film, “so you can actually go there and celebrate the elves,” Magnússon promised.

The composers weren’t sure yet whether they’d be able to attend the Oscars in person, but Húsavík residents are planning to stay up and watch. “We might have to consider late check-in at school the day after,” the mayor said. Should the songwriters ever make it to Húsavík, he offered to buy them a round of Jaja Ding Dong whiskey sours.

“Send the town our love,” Kotecha said. “We’re going to try and win it for you guys.” ♦