The anti-hero of the novel 101 Reykjavik travels around the world by browsing the World Wide Web and flipping through his satellite television channels without ever leaving downtown Reykjavik:

And very much like the country itself, Icelandic cinema is the kind of national cinema that is sometimes there and sometimes is not.

In the voluminous Oxford History of World Cinema not a single Icelandic film is mentioned (Nowell-Smith 1996). Nordic National Cinemas has a very brief chapter on Icelandic cinema (Soila et al. 1998). However, call it Scandinavian instead of Nordic and you can leave Iceland out of the equation, as in The Cinema of Scandinavia(Soila 2005), but then Peter Cowie (1992) includes the country in his study of Scandinavian Cinema.In Cinema TodayEdward Buscombe ends his chapter on Western European cinema with Iceland: ‘It seems appropriate to conclude with one of Europe's smallest nations. In an age of globalization it is heartening to find that such countries accord so important a place to national cinema’ (Buscombe 2003: 333). And in this very volume Iceland is represented as one of the world's smallest national cinemas - one where the local and the global meet face to face.