Breien will reunite with her Wives after 43 years
Norwegian director Anja Breien’s Wives – 40 Years After will complete “a feature series which is unique in film history” with backing from the Norwegian Film Institute.
Wifes - 40 years after. From left: Anne Marie Ottersen, Anja Breien and Frøydis Armand. Photo: Helen Prestgard
“We hit the spirit of the time, but knew nothing about the United Nations’ International Women’s Year 1975, when we started working on the film,” said Norwegian director Anja Breien later about Wives (Hustruer/1975), which wrote her into the Norwegian film history and sex role debate.
Starring (and co-created by actresses) Frøydis Armand, Katja Medbøe and Anne Marie Ottersen, the first film follows three woman – former class mates and best friends – who go on a three-day spree to celebrate the 10th anniversary of their final exams. Now they have wholly assimilated into the respective husbands’ environments.
40 years later
Face-to-face they rediscover themselves as they once were – no doubt still are – beneath the disguises their marriages have forced upon them. Prejudices uncovered, defences dropped, the film exposes the absurdity of the married woman’s situation. And then they all return to their families.
Breien and her actresses have till now reunited for two follow-ups on the most recent lives of the three characters in Wives – 10 Years After (Hustruer – 10 år etter/1985) and Wives III (Hustruer 20 år etter/1996), and now they preparing Wives – 40 Years After (Hustruer - 40 år Etter), the last chapter. Actress Katja Medbøe died after the second film, and this time we meet two of the wives again, 40 years after the first film.
The Norwegian Film Institute will now chip in €0.5 million (NOK 4.5 million) production funding for the €1.6 million (NOK 15 million) project of a the fourth feature, which - from a script by Breien, Armand and Ottersen - will be staged by Norwegian producer Eric Vogel for Oslo’s Tordenfilm.
Unique in film history
- The significance of the Wives project can hardly be overestimated: generations of Norwegians have been able to follow Norwegian life over three decades from a woman's perspective. No fictional characters have ever been depicted during to many years by the same director and ensemble: this series is unique in film history.
- The new film will be created in the spirit of the first movie - with ease and self-esteem, in a playful, modern movie language. We follow the Wives in their continued harselas with the roles society imposes on them, now as older women,” said feature film consultant Silje Riise Næss, of the Norwegian Film Institute.
Funding for Hope
The institute has also allocated €1.2 million (NOK 1.05 million) production funding for Norwegian director Maria Sødahl, whose feature debut Limbo (2010) received five Norwegian Amanda awards, and named her Best Director at Canada’s Montreal International Film Festival. It took 50,000 admissions in the local cinemas.
Scripted by Sødahl, Hope (Håp) is based on a true real-life story about Anja, a young woman in the midst of an active career, who is told on Christmas Eve that she is suffering from a life-threatening cancer.
With her husband Tomas, their three children, three stepchildren and her father she is thrown into a turbulant Christmas week, where the course of illness will reveal an ailing relationship and put a love story in focus.
The €3 million (NOK 28.5) Thomas Robsahm and Yngve Sæther production for Oslo’s Motlys will star Norwegian actress Andrea Bræin Hovig and Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgård. The film will be ready for premiere in the autumn of 2019.
