Who killed Palme? Sweden’s SVT investigates in The Death of a Pilgrim

by Jorn Rossing Jensen

14/05/2012 - The Death of a Pilgrim – a 4x60min television series about the 1986 unsolved murder of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme (pictured), produced by Swedish public broadcaster SVT Drama – has started principal photography in Stockholm, under the direction of Danish director Kristoffer Nyholm.

Swedish actor Rolf Lassgård stars as chief of the national police, Lars Martin Johansson, who is frustrated that the murder was never cleared up; he gets the chance of setting up a task force to help him see the investigation in a new light.

The series is based on three books by Swedish criminologist and author Leif GW Persson, Between Summer's Longing and Winter's Cold (2002), Another Time, Another Life (2003) and Falling Freely, as in a Dream (2007), about the Palme assassination.

The Swedish prime minister was shot in the back and killed in front of Stockholm’s Grand cinema on February 28, 1986, when he was on hs way home with his wife, after he had watched Swedish director Suzanne Osten’s The Mozart Brothers.

A Swedish criminal Christer Petterson was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder in 1988, but set fee the following year by an appeal court, citing lack of evidence. Petterson died in 2004, and the Palme murder is still unsolved.

Co-produced by Nordisk Film Production AB, the film co-stars Helena af Sandeberg, Henrik Norlén, Ellen Jelinek, Jonas Karlsson, Claes Malmberg and Kjell Bergqvist. Nyholm previously directed most of the episodes for the Danish television series, The Killing.

Palme is also the subject of a three-part TV documentary and a feature, Palme, directed by Maud Nycander and Kristina Lindström, for B-Reel Feature Films. ABBA’s Benny Andersson wrote the score for the film, which Scanbox Entertainment Sweden will release in September.