Oslo, August 31st

Joachim Trier's Oslo, August 31st opened in 2011 and was widely received as one of the most distinctive Norwegian films of its decade. The film is the second feature in what would become Trier's loose Oslo Trilogy (after Reprise (2006) and before The Worst Person in the World (2021)) all built around Anders Danielsen Lie as the central male presence and all set in contemporary Oslo. Adapted loosely from Pierre Drieu La Rochelle's 1931 novel Le Feu follet, which had previously been adapted by Louis Malle as Le Feu Follet in 1963.

Anders (Anders Danielsen Lie, in the central performance widely cited as one of the most distinguished Norwegian-cinema acting achievements of the decade) is a thirty-four-year-old recovering addict given one day's leave from a residential treatment centre outside Oslo to attend a job interview in the city. The film follows his single day across the city, visits to old friends, an attempt to reconnect with the family he has not seen in years, the job interview itself, the slow accumulation of small encounters across central Oslo's geography. Hans Olav Brenner plays his old friend Thomas; Ingrid Olava plays his sister Tove.

Jakob Ihre's photography of contemporary Oslo (Vigeland Park, Karl Johans Gate, Frogner-area apartment exteriors, the broader continuing urban-environmental geography) produced one of the most distinctive recent landscape registers in Norwegian cinema. Trier's collaboration with Eskil Vogt on the screenplay (the partnership that would extend across all three Oslo films) and Lie's central performance combine into a film widely cited as one of the foundational works of contemporary Scandinavian art cinema.