09/11/2012 - Unspooling between November 14-17 at Elverum, Norway, Movies on War screens 18 features, documentaries and shorts from nine countries, adding seminars, discussions and exhibitions

Among the around 4,000 film festivals in the world, there is only one focusing on war and conflict, peace and reconciliation: Movies on War, which takes place between November 14-17 at Elverum, Norway.

Instigated last year, with former head of the Norwegian Film Institute Vigdis Lian as festival director, the upcoming programme will include 18 features, documentaries and shorts from nine countries in three main sections, Nordic View, Our Difficult Past and Consequences of War.

Nordic View will be opened by Danish actress-writer-director Anne-Grethe Bjarup Riis' feature debut, This Life [+see also:
trailer
interview: Anne Grethe Bjarup Riis
film profile] (aka The Hvidsten Group (2012)), about resistance in provincial Denmark during the German occupation between 1940-1945. The film has reached 765,000 domestic admissions.

Swedish director Magnus Gerten's documentary, Harbour of Hope (2011), follows three of the around 30,000 survivors from German concentration camps arriving at Malmö in 1945 after the war; Finnish director Klaus Härö's drama Mother of Mine [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (2005) is the story of one of the 70,000 Finnish children sent to security in the other Scandinavian countries during the Winter War 1939-1940.

The soldier's role is depicted through two new American documentaries, Sara Nesson's multi-Emmy-nominated The Poster Girl, about a high-school cheerleader suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder after war service in Iraq, and Casey Cooper Johnson's Unmanned, about a young drone operator jolted by the pictures of civilians killed by one of his airstrikes.

Our Difficult Past comprises a seminar, The Deportation of Jews - 70 Years After, exploring "the Norwegian Holocaust" when on November 26, 1942, 770 Norwegian Jews were sent to German concentration camps - only 34 survived.