The 12th Man

Harald Zwart's The 12th Man (Norwegian: Den 12. mann) is a 2017 Norwegian war film based on the real story of Jan Baalsrud, the sole survivor of Operation Martin, a 1943 SOE-coordinated sabotage mission against German installations in the Norwegian Arctic. The events have been dramatised twice before in Norwegian cinema, most famously in Arne Skouen's Nine Lives (1957), which had been Norway's first Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film.

Zwart returned to Norway for the production after fifteen years working on Hollywood properties including The Karate Kid (2010) and The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones (2013); The 12th Man was his first Norwegian-language feature. The cast is led by Thomas Gullestad in the title role, with Jonathan Rhys Meyers as the Gestapo officer Kurt Stage and a supporting ensemble drawn from leading Norwegian theatre and television actors including Mads Sjøgård Pettersen and Marie Blokhus.

The film was shot largely on location in northern Norway during the actual months and weather conditions Baalsrud's escape would have involved, including extensive sequences on glaciers and on the open Arctic Ocean. It became one of the highest-grossing Norwegian-language films at the domestic box office in 2017 and was acquired for international distribution by IFC Films. The Baalsrud story remains one of the central narratives of Norwegian wartime memory; Baalsrud himself died in 1988 having lived in Norway, Spain and Tenerife after the war.