OFFICIAL SELECTION – 2024 TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL (Special Presentation)
OFFICIAL SELECTION – 2025 ROTTERDAM INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
Acclaimed director Erik Poppe (The King’s Choice) returns to wartime Norway with QUISLING: THE FINAL DAYS, a bold and fascinating new historical drama about the country’s infamous – if not most controversial - autocratic leader.
July, 1945. Norway has been liberated following WWII, and the country’s head of state Vidkun Quisling (Gard B. Eidsvold, in a towering performance) is arrested and put on trial for high treason, accused of collaborating with the Nazis. While devoted wife Maria (Lisa Carlehed, The Emigrants) defiantly stands by her husband and does her utmost to save his life, pastor Peder Olsen (Anders Danielsen Lie, The Worst Person In The World) begins a series of meetings that officials hope will extract a measure of contrition from the defiant politician. Proud and unbending, Quisling rehearses the stance he will declare in court: that everything he did was to counter the spread of Bolshevism, and to protect Norway from the horrors of war…
Powered by strong performances and staged with a steely, classical focus, QUISLING: THE FINAL DAYS is a stirring meditation on complicity, faith and the human capacity for self-deception. Digging deeply into the circumstances and motivations of Quisling – a man whose name has become a byword for traitor – this eloquent, thought-provoking film presents him not only as a figure of great complexity, but also one with a disconcerting abundance of contemporary counterparts.