King of Devil's Island

Marius Holst's King of Devil's Island (Kongen av Bastøy) opened in 2010, won the Amanda Award for Best Norwegian Film at the Haugesund festival, and became one of the most widely exported Norwegian features of its decade. The screenplay, by Dennis Magnusson, Mette M. Bølstad and Lars Saabye Christensen, draws on real events at the Bastøy Boys Reformatory, a remote island institution in Norway where boys aged 11 to 18 were sent for what the period called moral correction.

The year is 1915, the place the Bastøy reformatory island in Oslo Fjord. Erling (Benjamin Helstad), a defiant young new arrival, finds himself among boys kept under harsh discipline by the nominally reformist warden (Stellan Skarsgård) and his sadistic deputies (Kristoffer Joner). Trond Nilssen plays Olav, a long-serving inmate who has spent most of his adolescence at the institution. The film follows Erling through the months in which he adjusts to the place and slowly finds a moral standing of his own among the other boys.

John Andreas Andersen shoots it in a stark wintry register, with long static frames of the snowed-over island, the bunkhouse interiors and the small chapel. Holst takes real care over historical and procedural detail (a boys' uprising on Bastøy in 1915 partly inspired the screenplay), and he gets strong central performances from Helstad and Skarsgård. Together they make it one of the most distinctive Norwegian historical dramas of recent years.