Thanks to the Norway Expanded project, at the 11th NH IFF you will be able to watch Norwegian films, including the complete retrospective of Anja Breien.
Anja Breien is one of the most highly-regarded Norwegian directors, She was born in Oslo in 1940. Breien graduated from the film faculty at the prestigious Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques in Paris (IDHEC). Apart from Vibeke Lokkeberg and Laila Mikkelsen, she co-created the feminist style, inspired by Ingmar Bergman's personal cinema, of the New Wave of Norwegian cinematography. She made her first full-length film, Rape (Voldtekt), in 1971. Breien is famous, among other things, for The Witch Hunt (1981), and the trilogy: Wives (Hustruer, 1975), Wives - Ten Years After (Hustruer - ti år etter, 1985), and Wives III (Hustruer III, 1996). The first part of the trilogy, written in cooperation with the actresses playing the main roles, was a female answer to the film Husbands by John Cassavetes. The original cinema of Anja Breien is often compared to the output of Chantal Akerman, a Belgian director. As a result of its personal nature, it reaches beyond the modernist avant-garde.