06/02/2012

With little acting experience, but a bachelor’s degree in special pedagogy, Norwegian 23-year-old newcomer Iben M Akerlie (pictured) will star in Victoria, the first film with Norwegian dialogue from Nobel laureate Knut Hamsun’s novel, following a lengthy casting procedure with several test screenings by Norwegian director Torun Lian.

The €4.2 million production, due to start principal photography later this month (February) around the Vänern lake in Sweden, will be staged by Norwegian veteran producer John M Jacobsen (Max Manus [+see also:
trailer
film profile], The Troll Hunter [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Andre Øvredal
film profile]) for his Filmkameratene AS, with Sveinung Golimo and Pancho Kohner, son of legendary Hollywood agent Paul Kohner, who purchased the film rights directly from Hamsun before World War II.

Lian, whose latest feature was the award-winning The Colour of Milk (2004), has herself adapted the 1898 love story of Victoria, the daughter of a wealthy landowner, and Johannes, the miller’s son. While she is forced to marry another to save the family’s troubled economy, he fights social hierarchy and becomes a successful author.

They never meet again: when they are finally ready for each other, she dies from tuberculosis.

Akerlie will star with Norwegian actor Jakob Oftebro (Max Manus, Kon-Tiki) and Swedish actor Bill Skarsgård, a Shooting Star at the upcoming Berlin International Film Festival, where both his recent The Crown Jewels and Simon and The Oaks [+see also:
trailer
interview: Bill Skarsgård
film profile] are on show in Generation 14+ and the EFM, respectively.

The latest film adaption from Hamsun’s novel – he named his own daughter (born in 1902) Victoria after the book – was by Swedish director Bo Widerberg, whose Swedish-German cast version was launched in competition at Cannes in 1979. German director Carl Hoffmann released his Viktoria in 1935.