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Norwegian actress Pia Tjelta will lead the cast of Nina Knag’s feature debut Don’t Call Me Mama, which is in pre-production ahead of a June 2024 shoot.

REinvent International Sales is handling international sales and launching the film at Cannes, with Scanbox Entertainment holding Nordic distribution rights.

Don’t Call Me Mama follows a high school teacher who falls in love with a young asylum seeker, sparking a forbidden relationship with consequences for them both.

Kristoffer Joner, Tarek Zayat, Kathrine Thorborg Johansen also star alongside Tjelta.

Knag and Kathrine Valen Zeiner wrote the script, with Eleonore Anselme and Ingrid Skagestad...

Power Play, a 1970s-set comedy that plays with the conventions of period TV, docudrama and political satire, has won the top prize for best series at this year’s Canneseries television festival.

The series stars Kathrine Thorborg Johansen as Gro Harlem Brundtland, a young doctor and women’s choice activist in the 1970s who, through a series of accidents, stumbles into politics and, while the government around her implodes, learns to play the power game, rising the ranks to become Norway’s first female prime minister. The project, which plays like a comedic version of Danish political series Borgen, also took the best music honor at Canneseries for Kåre Christoffer Vestrheim, Andrea Louise Horstad, Kristoffer Lo and Eivind Helgerød.

Created by showrunner Johan Fasting and directed by Yngvild Sve Flikke, the series was produced by Motlys and Fremantle label Novemberfilm for Nrk / Ndr in Norway. Power Play is being sold worldwide by REinvent International Sales.

Norwegian comedy series Power Play has won Best Series in the Canneseries International Competition.

The series — originally called Makta and written by Silje Storstein, Kristin Grue and Johan Fasting — is for Norwegian pubcaster Nrk and Ndr and is from Motlys and Fremantle-owned Novemberfilm. REinvent International Sales has distribution rights.

Fasting is the showrunner and Kathrine Thorborg Johansen, Jan Gunnar Røise star.

Power Play is billed as “the incredible story of Gro Harlem Brundtland, who in the late 70s works as a young doctor, fighting for self-determined abortion, when she almost by accident, stumbles into politics. As the government implodes around her, Gro learns to play her own games of power, climbing the ranks until she is the last woman standing in the ruins of Labour’s celebrated social democracy, ending up as Norway’s first female Prime Minister in 1981.”

The 12-part series also bagged Best Music with Kåre Christoffer Vestrheim,...

Norwegian political satire “Power Play” proved unbeatable at Canneseries, just like its headstrong protagonist, picking up awards for best series and music.

The show, focusing on Norway’s first female Prime Minister, Gro Harlem Brundtland, and starting out in the 1970s, turned out to be a timely proposition, as noted by showrunner Johan Fasting, who co-wrote with Silje Storstein and Kristin Grue.

“It’s hard to persevere in politics, especially for women. We wanted to go behind the scenes of social democracy as well, see how it has dissolved and turned into what we have today. It felt like the right time to look at the mechanisms of power,” he told Variety earlier this week.

While the show delves into local politics, its youthful “punk” attitude and humor, which already drew early comparisons to the works of Armando Iannucci, seems to have paid off, seducing jurors Lior Raz, Zabou Breitman,...

Variety has been given exclusive access to the trailer (below) for “Power Play,” which world premieres in the main competition section at next month’s series festival Canneseries. The fiction series is a raucous satire inspired by the real-life goings on behind the scenes when politician Gro Harlem Brundtland came to power in Norway in 1981. The power struggles and backroom bickering in the show bring to mind “Veep” and “In the Loop.”

Brundtland was the first female prime minister of any Nordic country, not just Norway, and one of Scandinavia’s leading figures in the fight for women’s rights, gender equality and abortion rights, with a standing on a par with Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Gloria Steinem in the U.S., or Simone Veil in France.

REinvent International Sales is handling world rights. The company is also selling romantic dramedy “Out of Touch,” which has been selected for the Short Form Competition at Canneseries,...

Powered by its famed partners, Oslo-based Motion Blur, one of Norway’s top producers of commercials, features and TV shows, has never been that busy with projects both on home turf and in the U.S.

That activity in part rolls off the pulling power of the company’s pedigreed partners: “Karate Kid” helmer Harald Zwart; “Kon-Tiki” and “Pirates of the Caribbean-Dead Men Tell No Tales” co-helmer Espen Sandberg: and producer Espen Horn.

Minority shareholder Sf Studios lends Motion Blur adds financial stability. The genre-bending outfit also boasts a unique bond with Netflix that has translated into three Norwegian-language orders over the past year-and-a -half from the U.S. giant.

Helmed by rising talent Jarand Herdal, chiller “Cadaver,” Netflix’s first Norwegian feature, premiered last October. Motion Blur’s vampire comedy show “Post Mortem: No One Dies in Skarnes” is launching on the giant streamer on Aug. 25. A third Netflix title,...

"Drive for love, Roy! Drive for love!" Netflix has debuted an official trailer for an action comedy film from Norway titled Asphalt Burning, which is the new English release title. This is actually the third movie in an action comedy, high octane car racing franchise from Norway called Børning - the first one (Borning: The Fast & The Funniest) opened in 2014, followed by Børning 2 in 2016. When the brakes slam on his wedding, Roy (the main character from all the Børning films - played by Anders Baasmo Christiansen) accepts a challenge from a new foe to race for his own runaway bride at the iconic Nürburgring track in Germany. "Børning 3 is mainly set in Germany, still focusing on car racing – high speed, fierce competition, with an exciting confrontation at the famous race track." Also starring Kathrine Thorborg Johansen, Ida Husøy, Otto Jespersen, Sven Nordin, and Trond Halbo. This looks like good-hearted racing fun.

Harald Zwart, who directed the Jaden Smith-fronted reboot of The Karate Kid, is to helm a six-part TV drama for Netflix.

The streamer has ordered the untitled thriller series from Scandinavian production company Motion Blur. It is written by rising writer Petter Holmsen and production has just begun in Skarnes, Norway.

The Norwegian-language serialized story is told over six episodes with a cast including Kathrine Thorborg Johansen (Live), Elias Holmsen Sørensen (Odd), Andrée Sørum (Reinert), Kim Fairchild (Judith), Sarah Khorami (Rose) and Terje Strømdahl (Arvid).

Live Hallangen is declared dead. Hours later on the forensic table she suddenly wakes up with a sudden urge for blood. Meanwhile, her brother Odd tries to keep the family driven funeral home afloat, but there simply aren’t enough people dying in the small Norwegian town of Skarnes. When Live’s bloodthirst keeps intensifying she soon realizes that this newfound urge can actually solve her brother’s problem.

Roar Uthaug’s 2015 “The Wave” revived the pleasures of the 1970s disaster-movie cycle in a form that seemed purer than the never-quite-dead genre’s recent Stateside incarnations — most of which seem to involve Dwayne Johnson in a generic pileup of CGI perils. “The Wave” wasn’t high art, but it was entertainment that delivered some standard satisfactions without treating the viewer like an easy mark.

“The Quake,” written by the same duo of John Kare Raake and Harald Rosenlow Eeg, is a “more of the same” sequel that’s just as good as the original, in nearly identical ways. Yes, there’s a tolerably talky buildup to wade through first, but once again it pays off in heightened human involvement when the mass destruction hits the fan. With Uthaug having defected to Hollywood and the “Tomb Raider” remake, this entry is helmed by veteran cinematographer John Andreas Andersen, whose second...