‘This Woman Demands Joy’: Norway’s Canneseries Entry ‘Afterglow’ Tackles ‘The Big C’
06.04.2022 - 13:01
/ variety.com
Marta Balaga In Monster Scripted’s seven-episode series “Afterglow,” hailing from Norway, Ester – mother, wife and a friend – finds out she has cancer. But instead of giving in to pain, she “demands joy,” actress Nina Ellen Ødegård told Variety at Canneseries after its premiere in main competition.
REinvent handles sales.“She gets desperate, in a way, and I find it so true,” she says about her spirited character who refuses to be victimized. Ødegård, also a regular in supernatural Nordic noir “Seizure,” embraced – and loved – Ester’s failings.“After seeing the first episodes again, I thought: ‘I am so rude!’ But we wanted to show her being as human as possible, so that others can hopefully recognize themselves in her struggle.
I haven’t experienced illness [knocks on wood], but when I became a mother, I was also obnoxious to my friends. I always felt like I didn’t have enough time.
Once you experience something life-changing, you do become a bit greedy.” “Afterglow,” created by Atle Knudsen and Kjetil Indregard (who co-wrote the show with Mads Løken), hit close to home for Knudsen, however, who went through a similar experience after his wife, journalist Vera Micaelsen, was also diagnosed with cancer.“The first thing that happened was that Monster sent Atle and me to ‘a spa,’ as they do, to write a relationship drama,” says Indregard.“We couldn’t come up with anything and then Atle said: ‘What about a story about a guy who might lose his wife to cancer?’ Which was exactly the position he was in at that moment. I thought this might be the most important thing I would ever work on as a writer.
It’s about life and death, it’s real, painful and beautiful. I remember Atle’s wife saying that ‘one day you will die, but all the
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