OPENING NIGHT SELECTION - 2024 SCANDINAVIAN FILM FESTIVAL
OFFICIAL SELECTION - 2024 GÖTEBORG FILM FESTIVAL
From award-winning director Nils Gaup (The Last King, Pathfinder), THE RIOT is a grand historical drama based on true events, following a teenager whose desire to reunite with his family forces him prematurely into a man’s world: the pre-unionised copper mines of Northern Norway.
Late 1890s. When her husband dies, a young Swedish mother makes the heartbreaking decision to send her son away to Norway to work as a farmhand, so she may care for his younger sister. The boy, Konrad Nilsson, spends his childhood labouring, dreaming of earning enough to return home.
1907. Now sixteen-year-old Konrad (a terrific Otto Fahlgren) finds menial work as a sorter at a mine in Sulitjelma. The company controls all the land in the area - including seven separate prospecting sites - and sets its own rules with a private police force. When a new Swedish foreman Wennström (Simon J Berger) arrives, he takes a liking to Konrad and offers him an opportunity to advance, to the scepticism of the older, tougher colleagues he will now join for the dangerous underground work. But as Wennström’s demands to increase the mine's production pace get more and more risky, tensions rise and the workers meet in secret to organise a strike. However, there are informants within the crew and Konrad finds himself caught in the middle...
A powerful film about the dream of a better life, the compromises and exploitation of capitalism, trust and the fight for justice, THE RIOT plays out in the isolated snow-capped wilds under the Northern lights, against the backdrop of one of Norway’s most tumultuous, nation-defining events.