A total of 67 documentaries were selected from 541 submissions for Nordisk Panorama’s hybrid event.

Festival programmers Cecilia Lidin and Martijn te Pas said: “Selecting films for the Nordisk Panorama Film Festival was both pure joy and incredibly harsh. How do you select such a limited number of films from a region so rich in its documentary culture? We approached it with the ambition to show the diversity in voices, film language and themes in each country, and this method has resulted in a selection that we feel shows the depth and talent throughout the Nordic region.”

In the Best Nordic Documentary programme, 14 films are vying for the €11,000 cash award, sponsored by Nordic pubcasters DR, YLE, RUV, NRK and SVT.

Among those are Echo by Rúnar Rúnarsson, just selected as Iceland’s candidate for the upcoming Nordic Council Film Prize. The ensemble piece of 56 scenes, set between Christmas and New Year, are ‘fragments of lives’, filmed in a grew zone of fully-controlled fiction and documentary. Rúnarsson told us in an interview: “People tend to think that documentaries are more true than fiction films, but both are the results of a person’s vision and filmmaking decisions.”

To read Rúnar Rúnarsson interview: CLICK HERE. 

The other competitors are: 

  • All that I Am by Tone Grøttjord-Glenne (Norway/Denmark) 
  • Beautiful Something Left Behind by Katrine Philp (Denmark) 
  • Bitter Love by Jerzy Sladkowski (Sweden/Finland) 
  • Eye to Eye by John Webster (Finland) 
  • Idomeni by David Aronowitsch (Sweden) 
  • iHuman by Tonje Hessen Schei (Norway/Denmark) 
  • Lady Time by Elina Talvensaari, (Finland), Nordisk Panorama’s opening film 
  • Meanwhile on Earth by Carl Olsson (Sweden/Denmark) 
  • Songs of Repression by Estephan Wagner, Marianne Hougen-Moraga (Denmark/Netherlands)
  • Still Into You by Anu Kuivalainen (Finland)  
  • The Cave by Feras Fayyad (Denmark/USA) 
  • The Last Autumn by Yrsa Roca Fannberg (Iceland) 
  • The Painter and the Thief by Benjamin Ree (Norway)

The New Nordic Voice programme has 18 films running for the €5,000 cash prize, including the Finnish entry Colombia in My Arms by Jenni Kivistö & Jussi Rastas. The documentary supported by Nordisk Film & TV Fond is a portrait of Colombia, struggling for stability in the aftermath of the peace agreement with the FARC guerrillas.

The film was awarded a Dragon Award for Best Nordic Documentary at the last Göteborg Film Festival. 

Another 13 films are competing for the Young Nordic-Children’s Choice Award, and 22 for Best Nordic Short. The winning short will then qualify for an Oscar consideration.

The 31st Nordisk Panorama Film Festival will offer both online screenings and on-site talks and masterclasses, available for free streaming to audiences in the five Nordic countries. 

“We are thrilled that the digital festival will expand the filmmakers’ reach and let people from Akureyri, Iceland to Turku, Finland and everywhere in-between to experience the special feeling that attending the festival offers. It’s our hope that by enabling a wider audience to engage with these films, more will be inspired by these Nordic storytellers,” said the festival’s executive director Anita Reher.

The industry sidebar Nordisk Panorama Forum for Co-financing of Documentaries will be held September 18-23.

For further details, check: www.nordiskpanorama.com