Norwegian documentary has taken centre stage before, but its success at Sundance 2024 was unprecedented. Two feature docs from Norway (Ibelin by Benjamin Ree and A New Kind of Wildernessby Silje Evensmo Jacobsen) constituted 20% of the festival’s World Cinema Documentary Competition selection. By the time festival doors closed, A New Kind of Wilderness had won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize: Documentary, while Ibelin received both The Directing Award and The Audience Award in the World Cinema category.
Norwegian Film Institute Film Commissioner (Documentary) Klara Nilsson Gunning was at a shopping mall in Oslo when the news began to filter through on her watch. “One more… then one more…” she remembers. “I really couldn’t believe it. Not because I don’t believe in Norwegian documentaries, it’s because it’s unbelievable that two Norwegian documentaries win the best prizes at the most important festival in the States. That’s amazing. And what just trickled down is all the things that we have worked on, the focus towards North America, the focus to give the filmmakers the room to creatively develop unique projects – all those things came into place for me. It was a slam dunk in terms of the things that we’ve tried to elevate in order for this to be possible.”
International Relations Manager Elisabeth Aalmo, meanwhile, was eating tacos with her family when she heard the news, at which point she had to leap into action, prepping press releases. “Two films out of 10, out of over 17,000 submissions. I wasn’t surprised that there would be one award, but to have three awards…I started to cry actually. I was so incredibly happy on behalf of the filmmakers. It was amazing. It was fantastic.”
As remarkable as this success was, it comes, Nilsson Gunning argues, on the back of considerable local investment (in terms of both time and money) in Norway’s documentary talent.
“I’m not saying we have oceans of money for supporting documentary films, but there’s money in the system,” she says. At NFI she oversees a budget 43 million NOK (€3.8 million) that covers doc features and shorts, animation docs, hybrid, VR, and international documentary co-productions. The Institute also runs a new talent scheme for documentary features that is about 1.1millionUSD/year.
What’s more there’s is a “sharing culture”, she underlines, that promotes collaboration and greater productivity, and which serves to deliver higher quality. “If I learn something, I share it. If I have a good experience I’ll share it. If I am connected to somebody that can help your project, I will share it,” she articulates the Norwegian mentality. She also stresses the adaptability of her industry. “One of the biggest talents of Norway and the Norwegian film industry is that we’re fast… because it’s a small country [population 5.4 million]”
“There is also a very strong vein and drive to build something, not just to make a documentary, but also to sort of create a business out of it…The Norwegians are very good at that,” she adds.
Nilsson Gunning further underlines the importance of Norway’s geographic neighbours in the development of the doc sector. “It’s interesting to look at the Nordics as well and how they influence each other in terms of developing creative documentary as a whole, as a way of expression, as an art form. If you look back in history you see the journalist tradition of Sweden, for instance, and the artistic levels of Danish documentary, and then the Norwegian way of taking some of those learnings and running with it.”
Investment in development is paramount, the NFI commissioner adds. For her, development and production work in tandem. “If I compare, for instance, with the British model where development and production are much more separate, in Scandinavia…production is always development. You could basically almost make the whole film before you go into production here because you can get the sort of support, the kind of risk funds, which a lot of [commissioners] won’t do in other cultures.”
There is also a “less is more” mantra evident within Nilsson Gunning’s modus operandi, and those of her Nordic counterparts, in her decision to support fewer projects with more funding. “You can have a higher budget, but you can take a bigger risk early in development, so you can basically secure all your shooting before having to reach out to other financiers, meaning you have creative control longer.”
She explains what she means by ‘risk.’
“I know it’s very vague in a way, but the concrete answer is when nobody else wants to go in and support a project, we can do it. We don’t need approval from anybody else. We are a system where you have a single commissioner taking in an application and making a sole decision on the artistic quality of that production, which means that you don’t have to discuss with other people in order to make that decision. The effect of that is that you can be much more personal with what you choose.”
Decision by committee can have the effect of “watering down” the projects under consideration, whether in terms of relevance, complexity, authenticity and ultimately quality, she adds. “I think it’s a very special system that we have in the Nordics with the commissioners that we [take] sole decisions.”
Another factor is time, whereby a project is allowed to percolate until it is ready. “We’re trying to slow down the process as much as possible when there are other collaborative members of the team maybe that want it to come out very quickly, like a television station or a distributor, where we pull back and say ‘no, is this really the best it can be?’ Our role as commissioner and consultant is really to look at what the filmmaker’s vision is and being able to try to challenge that the whole time…Not waiting for a back-end, or having that time constraint is really crucial for the documentaries to be good.”
After a frenetic Sundance, Berlin is going to be relatively quiet (although CPH:DOX is around the corner where there are Norwegian selections across all key competitive sections).
At Berlinale, Norway is minority co-producer on No Other Land by Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor Yeah, providing “almost 50%” of the funding, and Inadelso Cossa’s The Night Still Smells of Gunpowder in Forum. International Relations Manager Elisabeth Aalmo will be at EFM “to have mostly meetings with the other festivals that are there and follow up all the interest around the Norwegian docs,” as well as “focus on the meetings with programmers to promote both the new releases and films in production.”
Returning to the recent Sundance success, Nilsson Gunning reminds BDE that the export value to Norwegian culture will be considerable, and is inspirational for the local film industry as a whole – and not just documentary makers. “As you know, documentary is always the stepsister of fiction, and so we always have to fight very hard in order to get the room to operate, and getting fame and glory is something that we took off the plate a long time ago. So I think this [Sundance success] was truly joyful actually, and of course it will inspire the industry as a whole to move forward and to say we’re really proud of where we are. It sets a temperature of where Norwegian documentary is today.”
