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Exclusive: The Gersh Agency continues to bolster its international talent roster with the signing of Norwegian-Pakistani filmmaker Ulrik Imtiaz Rolfsen, whose latest production Semester is the first Scandinavian drama on Snapchat Shows.

Norwegian youth series Semester was originally launched on its own site but has logged millions of views on Snapchat’s drama platform after being released earlier this month. The series has had viewers in 180 countries worldwide and was previously sold to Scandi broadcasters Nrk in Norway, Dr in Denmark and Sweden’s TV4.

The underground hit follows a teenager who returns to Oslo after dropping out of school and skipping town to travel to Paris. According to Rolfsen, who wrote and produced the series with Curry Film partner Alexander Johansson, 60% of the drama’s viewers are under 25 and almost 90% watch the series on mobile.

Rolfsen is also known for...

Gather together a bunch of disparate documentaries into their own festival and it becomes clear that there is an endless array of subject matter and stylistic approaches to non-fiction filmmaking. These docs can be expository or minimalist, intimate or grandiose, roughshod or highly formalist. Certainly, many documentarians are turning their interrogative camera towards topical subjects, particularly the conflicts in the Middle East and the ensuing tensions with Western nations.

Unspooling at AFI Docs is the extended international version of “Recruiting for Jihad,” by directors Adil Khan Farooq and Ulrik Imtiaz Rolfsen (a shorter television cut was previously featured at Toronto’s Hot Docs fest earlier in the summer).

Continue reading ‘Recruiting For Jihad’ Takes A Surface Level Look At A Complex Issue [AFI Docs Review] at The Playlist.

An investigative documentary about a newly jailed Salafi-Jihadist recruiter in Norway has already caused a court battle over whether the right of filmmakers to document the inner workings of Isis trumps the police's ability to fight terrorism.

Recruiting for Jihad, set to have its international premiere at the Hot Docs festival in Toronto later this month, features filmmakers Ulrik Imtiaz Rolfsen and Adel Khan Farooq following the notorious Norwegian Islamic recruiter Ubaydullah Hussain over a three-year period.

The directors got access to an Isis missionary seeking young Norwegian converts that would make any Western news organization envious. But...

Yes, we’ve been looking forward to this one rather a lot, thanks in no small part to the acting one-two punch of Nicolai Cleve Broche and Kristoffer Joner - two of the very best the region has to offer - in the leads. Set in the end of the hippie era and based on a cult novel The Last Joint Venture casts Broche and Joner as a pair of stoner pot dealers swept up in the wave of harder drugs that burst on to the scene in the seventies. Here’s the synopsis:

“Paranoid is when you think someone’s following you, but if you know it, that’s different, right?” says Carl in The Last Joint Venture. The final strains of the hippie decade are fading, and the 80s are looming ahead. Carl (Kristoffer Joner) and Robert (Nicolai Cleve Broch) are two wasters who live in harmony with the world,...