When Norwegian director Maria Sødahl (“Hope”) first got contacted by a duo of Danish scriptwriters with the seed for what would become the now Göteborg Dragon Award-winning “The Last Resort,” she was “fascinated” by its provocation.
The film is set in a luxurious holiday resort, where a Danish family is forced to reassess its moral compass following an accident involving an Afghan refugee. Sødahl penned the script alongside Therese Hasman and Eske Troelstrup, while the film stars Esben Smed (“Follow the Money”) and Danica Curcic (“Murina”). Speaking with Variety following her Göteborg win, Sødahl says what first drew her to the story was its “very consistent point of view.” “It’s a story about us, for us, by us, white, privileged Scandinavians. That is the most genuine thing about the movie, which is also provocative. You need to understand the privilege of that situation.”
‘It fascinated me to investigate the well-meaning humanistic gaze we have as Scandinavians sitting so safely up north,” she adds. “You can believe all these nice theories about taking in migrants, but when theory meets practice, there are these subconscious challenges that occur. Dealing with xenophobia can be quite ugly and primal, but we don’t have that awareness because it’s not something we deal with daily. We live in our bubble with our theories and virtues.”
The director clarifies, however, that “The Last Resort” is “not about the migrant crisis.” “The movie is about how we, privileged people, deal with the non-privileged. It’s about our self-image as being good human beings, and how this changes when we meet reality close up.”
“There are no answers to what is right or wrong in this story because whatever you do would be wrong,” she points out. “All I really want is for people to identify with the characters: what would I have done in this very uncomfortable situation?”
Sødahl says the film is also about a certain “Scandinavian naivety.” “If you go to the Mediterranean, they have had immigrants and refugees for hundreds of years, and they themselves have fled their countries. They know what it feels like to be an outsider. We haven’t experienced that. Norwegians immigrated to the United States.”
Recalling the production itself, Sødahl says the challenge was to “keep the drama down all the time, so there would be an underlying stream going on until it all explodes in this very ugly situation.” “It was tricky to find the right tone because this is a drama, it’s not satire. It’s a movie where you really need to believe in it. It’s a fiction, of course, but you have to feel a sense of truth so as not to feel you’re being manipulated.”
The Last Resort team
‘The Last Resort’ team, celebrating its top prize at the 2026 Góteborg Festival
Shot in the Canary Islands, “The Last Resort” granted the Norwegian director the chance to cast a large ensemble of non-professional actors, real-life migrants who worked closely with Sødahl on the production. The film also features two child actors through most of its runtime, a challenging ask logistically, but not so much when it comes to the sensitive themes of the film. The director emphasizes that the children “learned very quickly” that they were on a film set. “The adults were very aware that the same situation that we see in the film with the migrants was happening in real-life, very close to them.”
As for premiering close to home in Göteborg, Sødahl says she is “grateful” for the space, especially given the “challenging nature” of the film. “This is not an easy movie to get distribution for and to get into A-list festivals because of its DNA.”
“This is not a documentary, it’s a moral fable,” she adds. “It could be on any islands where you have resources for the privileged. Someone told me it’s like ‘The White Lotus’ for real [laughs] Some people compared it to Ruben Östlund, which is not, because this is not a satire. The shame, the guilt and the fear of the other is timeless. From the beginning, I always saw the island as the world and you have the resort as Europe, this gated fortress which you can’t enter.”
Asked about the current momentum of her home country’s film industry following Joachim Trier’s “Sentimental Value” landing a whopping nine Oscar nominations, Sødahl — who worked with the film’s star Stellan Skarsgård in the 2021 Oscar-shortlisted “Hope” — says she “loves to see what is happening.”
“The Danes have had their peak and now it’s Norway’s moment,” she adds. “I hope it’s good for all of us, Sweden as well, because there’s this attention to our part of the world and our way of storytelling. We can also do stories for the world.”
Alas, the filmmaker wraps her celebration with a caution: “At the same time, the film politics in Norway are hopeless, so it’s a momentum for the arts but not for how the country deals with the arts. Norway is a sports nation, not a culture nation. If [the Oscar attention] had happened with sports, the money would have poured in, and you don’t see this happening with film.”
“The Last Resort” is produced by Nordisk Film Production’s Thomas Robsahm (“The Worst Person in the World”) and Sigurd Mikal Karoliussen (“Twin”). Norway’s Eye Eye Pictures (“Armand”) co-produced, with support from the Danish Film Institute, the Norwegian Film Institute, Nordisk Film & TV Fond, in association with TV2 Denmark. TrustNordisk handles international sales.
