‘The Seer & The Unseen’: Environmental Activism Meets Mysticism In Sublime New Doc [SFIFF Review]

Ragnhildur Jonsdottir is the environmental activist and purported “seer,” who communicates with the elf community, at the center of Sara Dosa’s sublime new documentary “The Seer And The Unseen.” Better known as Ragga to her community, Dosa’s film tracks Ragga’s consultations with various project managers and builders, attempting to maintain a balance between Iceland’s natural environment, which Ragga believes is filled with various elves, and the country’s rapid growth and development. While the set-up to the film is, somewhat, absurd, Dosa treats her subject with empathy, not so much pushing against Ragga’s beliefs but, instead, using elves as a metaphor for the environmental activism that Ragga and her group, Friends of the Lava Conservation, participate in.  

The existence of elves, dwarves, and even trolls is, in fact, so centralized with Icelandic mythology that Ragga’s consulting business, in which she serves as a mediator between the spiritual and the real world, is constantly busy. Even those who don’t exactly believe in the spiritual respect Ragga, often noting that they rather be safe and try to appease the elves instead of risking whatever wrath may come from disrupting their environment.

Dosa’s film begins by tracking the day to day of Ragga’s life, but soon circles around a central development. The focal point of the film, a road that is being planned that would run through a lava field in Reykjavik, outrages Ragga and her eco-friendly group. Quickly the government and the activists take opposing sides, and the film focuses in on the protests that the Friends of the Lava Conservation enact. One sequence highlights how the police are forced to cart off the activists after they refuse to move out of a bulldozer’s way. Yet Dosa, taking a cue from Ragga, is not an incendiary storyteller, as she instead focuses on the quiet and mundane that takes place in the standoff between the two groups. No is injured, and the rhetoric on both sides is expressed with respect for their opposition.

Ragga is, also, practical, both in understanding how people might be skeptical of her gift and how much she can accomplish in the fight against big government. Obviously, the road is getting built, no matter how many protests her group stages. So she, instead, focuses in on moving a large boulder that houses an elf community. A somewhat insane request, Ragga is surprisingly successful in getting the government to spend money and time moving a large rock, just because of its possible mystical connection. When the stone is finally moved, with Ragga and others looking on, it’s a surprisingly suspenseful scene, as engineers and workers fret about the precarious cracks that show up and the possibility that the boulder might splinter in the move.

Even for those who are skeptical of Ragga’s gift, it’s almost secondary to the environmental work that she does. As she introduces herself to a few tourists, she asks them to tap into a childlike wonder instead of rationally critiquing everything. The film follows her lead. As a work of ecocriticism, Dosa articulates a clear view, realizing that it’s the small battles that can lead to more significant accomplishments. The boulder is just the beginning of Ragga’s eco-friendly push. By presenting this global environmental crisis through the microcosm of Ragga’s relationship with possible elfish communities, she has created a stirring and humane portrait of the possibilities if we only open ourselves up to otherworldly possibilities [A-]