Makta

Yngvild Sve Flikke's Makta (Power) won Best Series at Canneseries in 2023, along with several Norwegian Gullruten Awards. It established Sve Flikke, until then known for her feature work, as a prestige-television director, and drew international attention to a Norwegian tradition of political and historical drama that had been building steadily through the 2010s and 2020s.

The setting is Norway in 1972, the year of the country's first European Community referendum and one of the most politically consequential moments in its post-war history. Three figures carry the series. Reiulf Steen (Jan Gunnar Røise) is the Labour Party's young wunderkind, and Trygve Bratteli (Nader Khademi) his complicated mentor and rival. The third is the young, abrasively brilliant doctor Gro Harlem Brundtland (Kathrine Thorborg Johansen, who gives the central performance), at the start of the long road that would later make her Norway's first female Prime Minister.

The series reconstructs the politics of the period in close detail, and its real interest is in three people who defined a generation of Norwegian public life, and in how mid-century Scandinavian social democracy actually took shape around their rivalries. Andrea Bræin Hovig leads the substantial supporting cast as a senior figure in the political establishment of the day. The care taken over procedural and historical accuracy, and over the real Oslo of the 1970s, makes it one of the most distinctive Norwegian-language productions of recent years.