King of Devil's Island

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

1915, the Bastøy reformatory island in Oslo Fjord. Erling (Benjamin Helstad), a defiant young new arrival, finds himself among a population of boys subjected to harsh discipline by the nominally reformist warden (Stellan Skarsgård) and his sadistic deputies (Kristoffer Joner). Trond Nilssen plays Olav, a long-serving boy who has been at the institution most of his adolescence. The film follows the months of Erling's adjustment to the institution and his slow accumulation of moral position within the boys' community.

The film is shot in stark wintry register — long static frames of the snowed-over island exteriors, the bunkhouse interiors, the small chapel — by John Andreas Andersen. The film's commitment to historical-procedural specificity (the Bastøy institution had been the subject of a 1915 boys' uprising whose actual events partly inspired the screenplay) and to Helstad and Skarsgård's central performances combined into one of the most distinctive Norwegian historical dramas of recent years.