A concert film built less around a stage than around a life, When We Are Born turns a single performance into something closer to ritual. It gives Olafur Arnalds's music room to breathe as image, not just sound.
What is When We Are Born about?
Shot on location in Iceland during the summer of 2020, the short brings together musician Olafur Arnalds, choreographer Erna Omarsdottir and the Iceland Dance Company for a live performance built loosely from moments in Arnalds's own life. Rather than following a conventional plot, the piece moves through movement, staging and live sound recorded together on set, treating the two as a continuous exchange rather than music laid over pictures afterward. The music draws on Arnalds's own recent record, reworked and performed fresh for the camera, while the choreography and setting turn abstract feelings, ritual, connection, the pull of memory, into something physical and watchable. Cinematographer Thor Eliasson's camera stays close to the performers, favoring an intimate, handmade feel over a polished concert-film look.
About the cast
The piece centers on Olafur Arnalds, whose music and personal history shape the performance at its core, staged in collaboration with choreographer Erna Omarsdottir and dancers from the Iceland Dance Company.
Context & significance
Directed by Vincent Moon, known for intimate, on-location performance filmmaking, When We Are Born is an Icelandic short released in 2021 and runs a compact twenty-five minutes. It sits closer to performance art than traditional documentary, built around themes of ritual, relationship and inward reflection rather than narration or interview. Its short runtime is part of the design: a single, sustained performance rather than a full narrative arc. The choice to record music and movement together on location, rather than layering a score onto finished footage afterward, gives the whole piece a live, in-the-moment quality that a more conventional studio production would lose.
Watching When We Are Born on Ktime
When We Are Born is free to read about and stream on K-Time with a free account login, alongside the platform's broader selection of music and performance films. K-Time is built around a Farsi-first experience, with Persian dubbing and subtitles available on this title and a Persian-language interface used throughout the platform for its diaspora audience.