05/05/2017 - In Betrayed, the award-winning Norwegian director will depict “a story from one of the most dramatic chapters in Norwegian history”

When the Norwegian Film Institute chipped in €1.3 million for award-winning Norwegian director Marius Holst’s new film project, Betrayed (Den største forbrytelsen), on 27 April, the filmmaker had this to say: “This is a story from one of the most dramatic chapters in Norwegian history, which has never been shown on film before – it is exceptionally strong and has great cinematic potential.”

The movie is based on Norwegian author Marte Michelet's 2015 book about the persecution of the Jews in Norway during the Nazi occupation from 1940-1945. Norwegian screenwriter Harald Rosenløw Eeg, who provided the screenplays for Holst's Mirush [+see also:
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In the middle of the night, hundreds of Norwegian Jews were rounded up by the police and taken to the harbour in Oslo, where, together with detainees from a prison camp, they were piled onto a German cargo ship, the Danube. A total of 302 men, 188 women and 42 children left for Germany, final destination Auschwitz, including the Braude family, who had been living peacefully in Grünerløkka in Oslo. Their only crime: they were Jews.

“Before Michelet's book, it was a part of our history that very few people knew about, and which few were interested in illuminating,” explained (now former) Norwegian Film Institute feature-film consultant Wibecke Rønseth, who, together with her colleague Ståle Berg, agreed to give public funding to the €5.3 million feature, which will be staged by Martin Sundland and Are Heidenstrøm for Oslo's Fantefilm.

Educated at the London International Film School, Holst made his first feature, Cross My Heart and Hope to Die, in 1994 – it became a local blockbuster and won nine international festival prizes, including the Dragon for Best Nordic Film at Göteborg, the Prix de Montreal and the Blue Angel Award at Berlin. A co-founder/owner of Oslo's 4½ Productions, his latest effort, King of Devil's Island [+see also:
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