There has never been a lack of movies about World War II. From “Schindler’s List” and “Saving Private Ryan” to “Dunkirk” and “The Imitation Game,” they all portray the war from various angles through the eyes of the men who went to war. However, there are not many films that talk about how women sacrificed their lives and how they lived during the war. In Rebecca King’s short film, ElsaNow we see a completely different story related to World War II. The film chronicles the journey of a Norwegian woman of the same name, who is torn between her feelings for a man and her loyalty to her country. But why is it such an important story? Because a woman falls in love with a man who was a Nazi soldier and took over her country. History has forgotten such a story, but reports say that between 30,000 and 120,000 women were nicknamed “German women” because they fell in love with German soldiers.
Elsa the actor Nina Indis She plays the lead character who falls in love with a Nazi soldier named Christian (Lars Berge), and fans will get to see the inner conflict of a woman struggling to find her own identity. Flickers Rhode Island International Film Festival Star Wars Episode I: The Last Jedi, set for release in August 2024, is a special look at a story that has been forgotten by many. I recently had the opportunity to speak with the director. Rebecca King Actor/Co-Producer Nina Indis Speaking about adapting the story into a film, the duo said: “Meanwhile, they also shared how they researched this sensitive story.
Official poster for “ELSA” (Photo credit: @womenlikeelsa/Instagram)
What inspired you to focus on the theme of a love triangle in Nazi-occupied Norway, and how did you balance historical accuracy with creative storytelling?
Rebecca King: Oh, that’s a great question. Yeah. You’re right, there are a lot of world war stories. It’s pretty much the last genre I want to touch as a filmmaker. It might sound funny, but it’s because, from my own experience, I’ve come away from sitting in the cinema feeling very frustrated and empty from a lot of war stories. Of course, the genre is so exciting in that there’s a lot of excitement and drama around big events and trauma. But I think the beauty of this short was when I read Svetlana Alexievich’s book, it was kind of a light-bulb moment for me. I mean, the beauty of storytelling today is that we’re constantly unearthing a lot of stories and perspectives that haven’t been told, and the female perspective. There’s more and more of that in modern cinema, but in world war cinema, even though there are a lot of world war stories, the female perspective is still very scarce. So this is like a great opportunity to make sure that there’s something on the planet that can rival everything else that’s been told in that era.
Nina, how did you prepare for a role like this – playing someone caught in a love triangle during such a tumultuous time in history?
Nina Indis: I had been thinking about this role for years. I first played the role of Elsa in 2015, nine years ago now, as part of the play Narvik, written by playwright Lizzie Nunnally. The play has a character called Elsa, but it doesn’t focus on her life. It follows two Royal Navy soldiers who fight in the Battle of Narvik. Then I realized that every time I went to a show, people in the audience would come up to me and ask me more about Elsa, what her life was like. We had never heard of this. I had never heard of this phenomenon before. So Lizzie and I decided to approach Rebecca and explore this world. We read a lot of books on the subject and tried to find as much material as we could from real stories told by women who had been or had been treated in this way, but also tried to make connections with people whose families were in similar situations.
Basically, we read a ton of material on this: books, articles, masters degrees, etc. And we found quite a lot of stuff that didn’t have any concrete statements about how many women had this experience. Nobody really knows. But there are estimates. So, we, or they estimated, it was between 30,000 and 120,000 women in Norway. But it was the same in other countries that were occupied. So I was trying to get into Elsa’s perspective and understand exactly what you’re saying. She’s trying to live with a purpose. She’s a woman who wants to achieve something in life, and she has a purpose. She wants to be useful for her country. But at the end of the day, she feels like her opinion doesn’t matter. She’s in the resistance. She’s in the teachers’ protests. But her voice isn’t necessarily being heard by the country. By this time, Norway had been occupied for five years. I think I was trying to understand the psychology of a person living in a country that had been occupied for five years, what that brings, and the need for connection. I found a lot about Elsa’s psychology, trying to understand why she did what she did. And, certainly, it’s interesting.
Nina Indis in a still from “Elsa” (Photo: London Flare)
How did you research the historical context of Norway under Nazi occupation, and what was the most surprising thing you learned along the way?
Rebecca: We ordered a variety of books that deal with this particular perspective. To be honest, there aren’t many books about women’s stories either, because there’s a tendency for that to be the case. What I found so interesting about this story of Svetlana is that there’s this age-old habit of not asking women about events because they might touch more on the emotions of the time, in a broad sense, than on the facts and logistics. And they might not have a winning perspective in that sense, like the accuracy or correctness of dates and things. So often women’s voices aren’t explored, but actually, the emotions of the time are just as valid an explanation. It started with the book, but really, a lot of the time it was like, why tell this story now?
I think a lot of it started me thinking about my own questions as a woman, what is our place in society, why am I attracted to someone who is totally different, who is usually my enemy? And then I started thinking about how finding someone physically attractive and being attracted to them is a really boring path to take. We tried really hard to create a story where attraction isn’t just in a physical sense. Nina and Lars are both attractive people, but we tried really hard not to make it that story. Why do people bond and come together? And we looked at how they connected through the similarity of both being teachers and both being from Norway, two commonalities of two totally different nationalities. So I think this was also about looking introspectively at my own questions and my experience as a woman, and also looking at the questions I wanted to answer for myself of why people form connections. Should we criticize people just because they have connections with people of a different nationality or faith? Where are the lines?
With your Norwegian roots, this story may feel familiar to you. You may have heard more than what’s depicted in the short film. Did you go back and recall any stories your family might have told you about those times? How challenging was it to bring that to the screen?
Nina: When I started developing this story, I talked to a lot of people in the Norwegian industry, producers and storytellers, and I asked them why this story has never been shown on the big screen before, why there is no film. Actually, there is only one Norwegian film. But that’s it. You know, Norway makes a lot of war films, and they are always, or very often, about men who go to war. So we thought, let’s look into this. And we heard some very interesting stories. This is still a pretty taboo topic, and some people are not comfortable touching it, because it deals with taboo topics, like sexual relations between enemy Nazi soldiers and women. All of these things are still taboo. So, yeah, I heard that people try to avoid this topic quite often because of that. I looked into my own family, my distant relatives, to see if there was any family member who had experienced something similar. It was not a very welcome thing. No one told me that story. So maybe my family didn’t have that experience. But the funny thing is, my aunt contacted me after the film was finished. My co-producer Victoria also had someone who told me something similar, but her aunt reached out to her and said that her grandmother was a German prostitute and was assumed to be rude, and it wasn’t really talked about because it was embarrassing. So I spoke to her recently about it, and she told me about her grandmother and what she went through. It’s so nice to know that by opening up the conversation, we’ve created a space to explore this subject. People are now comfortable talking about it and sharing it. Back then, everyone took it to their grave and no one wanted to talk about it. Now we’re in a position where we can look back and reflect on these things without feeling embarrassed.
Lars Berge in a still from “Elsa” (Photo: London Flare)
Rebecca, can you talk about the visual and stylistic choices you made to capture the period and how these choices contribute to the storyline?
Rebecca: To be honest, I don’t have a lot of experience as a director with a camera, so I feel like I’m still developing technically, but actually, it was color that I started with. I was tired of war movies with brands and greenery and all that stuff. So I worked closely with Lauren Taylor, who is a fantastic production designer. She was very sensitive and she injected color into the environment. The costume designer and the hair and makeup department did the same thing. And then with Adam Singodia, the cinematographer, it was similar to when I started looking at paintings. I looked at a lot of Norwegian painters and artists who used a lot of great color. I love looking at shapes and the use of the body. And this is one of the things that I don’t speak Norwegian. So I was directing a movie where I didn’t know the language. So we started very physically, by looking at the shapes of people. So we started with a sense of painting. That was the starting point, the color. That was our priority. Me and Adam didn’t really talk much. We had a short list of how we were going to walk in every scene. We had a good idea about the blocking, how we wanted to push the actors. But we actually talked more about light. Our biggest language was considering the sunlight coming in through other people’s windows, something that everyone dances around and avoids, falling or passing by them or grazing their shoulder. You know, in the run-up to the final scene, people were coming further and further into the sunlight, and it was like a constant, definite truth, like everyone was dancing around. So that was the primary approach through painting and through light.
Elsa It is scheduled to premiere at Flickers Rhode Island International Film Festival in August 2024.
