From Oil & Gas Links:
Oil industry drama debuts in Cannes
A new dramatic version of how Norway’s oil industry began was making its debut on Tuesday at the first Cannes International Series Festival. The new Norwegian series is the biggest TV drama ever produced in Norway, based on events that also changed the nation forever.If that sets your heart racing a bit too fast there's always Norway's gift to the entertainment world: Slow TV.
Called Lykkeland (State of Happiness for its foreign audience), the series starts in the summer of 1969 in the then-financially struggling coastal town of Stavanger. The first eight episodes track how the discovery of oil and the lighting of a gas flare right at Christmastime fueled major personal, social and political changes during the next three years until Norway’s state-controlled oil company Statoil was founded in 1972. Those changes have been going on ever since.
The series won’t start running on Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK) until this fall. The first two episodes, however, are premiering in Cannes after the series was chosen to compete along with nine others from around the world. Organizers claim their first Cannes International Series Festival is meant “to give an international voice to this increasingly popular and fiercely creative new art form.” The festival is also taking place alongside the major TV industry conference MIPTV this week, adding to its international exposure.
Lykkeland (State of Happiness), produced for NRK by Maipo Film of Norway, received the lion’s share of financial support in 2016 from the Norwegian Film Institute, amounting to more than 10 percent of its total budget of nearly NOK 100 million (USD 13 million). That makes it the most expensive drama series ever, with top Norwegian film- and TV-industry figures behind it.
It’s directed, for example, by Petter Næss, whose classic film Elling was nominated for an Oscar as Best Foreign-Language Feature. The screenwriter is Mette M Bølstad, who’s also had success with the series Nobel and Kampen om tungtvannet (Heavy Water War)....MORE
Beginning with the groundbreaking train trip from Bergen to Oslo—put cameras on train, film passing scenery for seven hours—a quarter of the country tuned in (and now on Netflix), to thirteen hours of knitting to an epic 134-hour-long cruise voyage, Slow TV is the perfect antidote to the hurly-burly of Stavanger and the North Sea Oil biz.
Oh, and if you don't subscribe to Netflix here's the train trip via YouTube (running time 7:14:14)
Bergensbanen minutt for minutt
Additionally, "National Knitting Night":
was followed by the sequels
- National Knitting Evening
- National Knitting Morning
"Well, it has to be unique -- not a copy of the last one,"We'll be back with 18 hours of salmon swimming upstream if I can find it.
"So we have to push the boundaries for each show, I think."
