A bunch of lively Icelandic women in their 70s and 80s, former members of a feminist collective called the Red Stockings, are having a jolly time recounting the massive event they masterminded on Oct. 24, 1975, when 90 per cent of the women in their country just … took the day off. No cooking, no child care, no teaching. No working at the hospital, the fish plant, or the bank.
On a family trip to Iceland in 2016, Hogan chanced upon a paragraph about the Day Off in the back of a Lonely Planet guide. “Apparently I kept talking about it back home in New York,” she says, “until a friend finally said, ‘Shut up and write a proposal for a documentary, I can get you some money from Abby Disney’s company.’” On her first scouting trip, Hogan met Gunnarsdottir , who connected her to an ever-unspooling “human chain” of sources.
“I learned so much from those women,” Hogan says. “They’re so close to their feelings about that day. They used humour not just to open everyone’s ears to their message, but also to keep each other afloat.” “It’s a serious event, with serious issues that need to be discussed,” Eliza Reid, Iceland’s First Lady says on a separate video call, “including the eradication of gender-based violence, which is still prevalent in Iceland and everywhere else, and the rights of transgender and non-binary people. But the overall mood is not angry. It’s buoyant. I think that makes it more effective.”