Featuring Sigur Rós. In English and Icelandic with English subtitles. Unrated. Plays Friday to Sunday, April 18 to 20, at the Vancity Theatre

The music of Icelandic art rockers Sigur Rós may be ethereal or even impossibly heady, but as this beautifully shot documentary shows, they play a kind of music that is as authentic as it is radical, in several senses of the word.

Centred by Jon Thor “Jonsi” Birgisson’s eerie falsetto vocals (his lyrics are not subtitled, but brief interviews, in English, are), the band is not as playful as Bjí¶rk or the Sugarcubes. But the four intense young men—frequently augmented by an all-female string quartet called Amiina—are even more closely identified with the Norse-myth mood of their chilly homeland. Heima (pronounced “hey-ma”, and meaning home in Icelandic) heightens this by following the band on its 2006 travels of the island soon after returning from a world tour.

This was no ordinary homecoming, as the musicians performed in some of the most remote settings in that already isolated place, often with little or no advertising. This meant bringing electric instruments or acoustic replacements—as well as local guests, including a poet, a percussionist who makes marimbas out of volcanic slate and rhubarb, and an entire marching band—to churches, meeting halls, an abandoned fish factory, and a highland meadow later flooded by a dam built to power a smelter.

Sigur Rós was at that last spot to help protest the gradual corporatization of Iceland, and the film includes snippets of archival footage with stunning vistas of the country’s natural wonders, conveying its history and sense of place, as well as the band’s kinship with its fair-haired people. Intriguingly, Heima was directed by Dean DeBlois, a Canadian animator best known for writing or directing Disney features like Mulan and Lilo & Stitch. The film is a powerful, frequently moving reminder that art lasts longer than money.