The Reykjavík International Film Festival (RIFF) is hosting its Industry Days from 29 September to 3 October, focusing on projects in development. The event includes the established Work in Progress Showcase, which this year features ten projects at various stages of production, and the newly launched Arctic Script Lab, a pilot development programme for emerging screenwriters and writer-directors working on stories rooted in Arctic and Nordic experiences. The professional programme also includes the third edition of the Nordic Voices Think Tank, along with panels, master classes, and meetings with international industry guests. The Arctic Script Lab, developed by RIFF in partnership with the Nuuk International Film Festival and co-funded by the Nordic Culture Fund, brings together ten writers working on eight first or second feature-length fiction and documentary projects. Following an online development phase in August, the participants will meet in Reykjavík from 30 September to 3 October for mentoring, peer feedback, and industry encounters. Icelandic filmmaker Dagur Kári is mentoring the participants in the pilot edition. Several of the selected projects explore themes of land, resources, and the relationship between small communities and larger economic and political forces. Finnish filmmaker Elina Talvensaari, whose Lady Time won the Jussi Award for Best Documentary, is developing Sokli, about plans for a mine in Finnish Lapland and a group of older women whose connection to the land stretches back generations. In Goods, deep-sea mining serves as the backdrop for an encounter between a scientist searching the seabed for resources and a ship captain with a different relationship to the natural world. Rönnfeldt's short A Study of Empathy won the Golden Leopard at Locarno. Questions of history and who gets to tell it also run through the selection. Greenlandic writer Akku Kristensen and Mo Tan's dark comedy Aviliaq draws on the changing meaning of a Greenlandic word to explore Inuit cultural memory and the legacy of Danish colonisation. Claus Pilehave's The Ship That Wasn't There revisits the 1959 sinking of the Hans Hedtoft, shifting attention towards Greenlandic knowledge of Arctic conditions that has largely remained outside previous accounts of the disaster. Elsewhere, Pétur Óskar's Pearl of the North places Norwegian investors in an Icelandic island community of just 164 inhabitants, while Trygvi Danielsen's Faroese genre project Holes to Hell mixes organised crime, geopolitical tensions, and Huldufólk folklore. The Work in Progress Showcase, taking place on 2 October, gathers ten fiction and documentary projects from Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Finland, Portugal, and Poland, with co-production partners extending to Canada, Denmark, Sweden, Spain, Estonia, and Italy. The selection ranges from early development to post-production, with the showcase designed to connect filmmakers with international co-production partners, financiers, sales agents, and distributors. Among the more established names is Icelandic filmmaker Baldvin Z, whose Life in a Fishbowl and Let Me Fall both premiered at Toronto. His Icelandic-Canadian drama Dark Ocean, currently in development, follows a young deckhand entering the closed and physically demanding world of an Icelandic fishing trawler. Produced by Glassriver together with Canada's Terminal City Pictures, the project has Baltasar Kormákur, Ólafur Darri Ólafsson, Thorsteinn Bachmann, and Thorvaldur Kristjansson attached to its cast. Experienced producers are also prominent across the selection. Júlíus Kemp, whose credits include The Icelandic Dream, Let Me Fall, and the international co-productions The Bothersome Man and The Unknown Soldier, is producing Brynja Valdís Gísladóttir's Marathon Before Menopause, a dramedy currently in pre-production. Portuguese filmmaker and producer Rodrigo Areias appears twice in the line-up. Having produced more than 150 films, with projects collecting awards including the Golden Shell at San Sebastián and prizes at Venice and Locarno, he is producing Jorge Quintela's Mermaid in the Sun while also presenting his own documentary Ghost Voices at the rough-cut stage. The latter, co-produced with Finnish filmmaker Joonas Berghäll, travels through Europe's geographical and cultural peripheries through their languages, songs, and soundscapes. The remainder of the WIP selection reflects a broad mix of emerging voices and projects.