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The world of Cinema has never been devoid of films related to World War II. From Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan to Dunkirk and The Imitation Game, every film shows a different perspective of the war mainly through the eyes of men going to war. However, not many films talk about how women sacrificed their lives and how they lived during the war. In Rebecca King’s short film, ELSA, we see a very different story connected 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 allegiance to her country. But why is that such an important story? Because the woman falls in love with a man who is a Nazi soldier and has taken over her country. Although history has forgotten about such stories, reports indicated that 30,000 to 120,000 were called “German wh**es” for falling in love with a German soldier.

In ELSA, we see actor Nina Yndis playing the titular character who found herself falling in love with a Nazi soldier named Kristian (played by Lars Berge). Fans get to see the inner turmoil of a woman who is fighting for her own identity. The film, which will have its premiere at the Flickers Rhode Island International Film Festival in August 2024, is an extraordinary look at a story that has been long forgotten by many. I recently got a chance to talk to director Rebecca King and actor/co-producer Nina Yndis about bringing this story to life for the big screen. On the other hand, the duo also opened up about how they researched about such a sensitive story.

Official poster of ‘ELSA’ (Photo Credit: @womenlikeelsa/Instagram)

What inspired you to focus on the theme of a love triangle during the Nazi occupation in Norway, and how did you approach balancing historical accuracy with creative storytelling?

Rebecca King: Oh, that’s a beautiful question. Yeah. As you said there are so many World War stories. It’s almost the last kind of genre that I’d ever want to touch as a filmmaker, which sounds crazy, just because, as, you know, my own experiences, sitting in a cinema where I’ve just left feeling extremely frustrated and empty around a lot of war stories. Of course, the genre is very titillating in the fact that, yeah, there can be a lot of excitement and drama surrounding big events and a lot of trauma. But I think what was beautiful about this short, and I think reading a book by Svetlana Alexievich, which kind of was a light bulb moment for me. I mean, the beauty of today’s storytelling is that we’re constantly unearthing a lot of stories and perspectives that are untold and, you know, female perspectives. There are more and more within contemporary cinema, but still very much less so in World War films, even though there are a lot of World War stories. So it’s almost like a huge opportunity to make sure there’s something on earth there to counter everything else that’s told from that period.

Nina, how did you prepare for a role like this? Portraying a character involved in a love triangle during such a tumultuous period in history?

Nina Yndis: So I have sat with this role for many years, actually. I first played Elsa, this role back in 2015. So that’s nine years ago now, which was part of Lizzie Nunnery, who’s our script writer. It was part of her theater show called Narvik. And in this show, Elsa, the character, she’s featured, but we don’t zoom in on her life. It follows two British navy soldiers who are fighting in the battle of Narvik. Then what we found was after each performance, the audience would come up to me and be like, we want to know more about Elsa. What was her life like? We had never heard of this thing. We had never heard of this phenomenon before. So, that’s when Lizzie and I approached Rebecca and we decided to sort of delve into this world. We read loads of books on the subject, and tried to find as many materials as possible from true accounts, true stories told by women who had been treated this way or who had gone through this treatment, but also trying to connect with people who had family members who were in a similar situation.

Basically, we just read loads of materials on this. Books, articles, master’s degrees and we uncovered quite a lot where there’s not a specific account of how many women went through this. No one really knows. But there’s, like, estimations. So we’ve estimated, or they’ve estimated is between 30,000 to 120,000 Norwegian women. But it was the same in different occupied nations. So for me, getting into Elsa’s sort of perspective, I was trying to understand exactly what you’re saying. She’s trying to live a life with purpose, she’s a woman who wants to achieve something in her life, she’s got purpose. She wants to be useful for her country. But ultimately, she feels like her voice isn’t important. She works in the resistance. She’s part of the teacher’s protest. But her voice isn’t necessarily being heard by her country. By this time, Norway had been occupied for five years and I think was trying to understand the human psychology of living in a country that had been occupied for five years and what that does, and the need for connection. There were so many things that I uncovered with Elsa’s psychology, trying to understand, why she did what she did. And, yeah, it’s fascinating.

Nina Yndis in a still from ‘ELSA’ (Photo Credit: London Flair)

How did you go about researching the historical context of Nazi-occupied Norway, and what were some of the most surprising things you learned during that process? 

Rebecca: We ordered a range of books that kind of covered this particular perspective. To be honest, there are also not many books of stories from women because the tendency is. And this is what I found so fascinating with Svetlana, is she goes, women and I think this is an age-old thing of women often aren’t asked about events because they, in a general, broad sense, might touch more on the feelings of that time rather than the facts and the logistics and quite often and, you know, dates and getting things accurate and right in that sense, and maybe might not have a victorious perspective. So quite often, women’s voices weren’t delved into, but actually, like, the feelings of that time are as valid an account. So it started with the books, but then actually, a lot of it was like, okay, you know, why tell this story now?

I think a lot of it was asking my own questions as a woman of, like, oh, yeah, what is our place in society? Why would I be attracted to somebody from a completely different, you know, who would be typically the enemy started making me think about those things of, like, okay, a very uninteresting path would be, finding someone physically attractive and being attracted to them. We worked very hard to create a story where the attraction wasn’t just in a physical sense. Nina and Lars are both attractive people, but we worked quite hard to make sure it wasn’t that story. You know, why do people bond and come together? And we looked at how they connected over similarities of both being teachers, both being from Norway, these common things across, you know, two people that hold very different flags. So I think it was also just actually quite like an introspective look into my questions and my own experience as a woman and why, you know, looking at the questions that I wanted to answer myself of Why do people form connections? Should we judge people for having connections with people who have a different nationality or belief? You know, where is the line there?

As someone who has Norwegian roots, Nina, this story might feel personal to you. You might have heard even more than what is shown in the short film. Did you go back in time and remember certain things that your family must have told you about those times? And how hard was it for you to then present that on the screen? 

Nina: When we started developing this story, I spoke to quite a few people in the industry in Norway, producers and storytellers, asking, why hasn’t this story ever been shown on the big screen? Why are there no films? There is one film actually, there is one Norwegian film. But that’s it, you know, Norway makes so many war films, and it’s always or very often about the man who goes out to battle. So I was like, we want to look into this and what we were told is quite interesting. It’s still quite like a taboo topic and some people don’t feel comfortable touching upon it, because it’s talking about taboo subjects like women’s sexuality with the enemy Nazi soldiers. All of these things are still taboo. So, yeah, I was told that people were trying to avoid the subject, quite often, just because of that. I tried to sort of look into my family, my distant family, tried to see whether I had anyone in my family who had gone through a similar thing. I wasn’t met with like, open arms. No one told me about it, which might mean that no one in my family went through that. But what’s interesting is that after the film has now been made, my aunt got in touch and also a Victoria our co-producer, she also had someone, who told her about a similar thing, but my aunt got in touch and she said that her grandmother was branded German whore, discourteous and that it wasn’t something that people really talked about, because it’s kind of shameful. So, I had a conversation with her recently about it where she told me about her grandmother and what she had gone through and it is quite nice to know that now that we’ve kind of opened up for the discussion we’ve opened up for this topic to be explored. People feel more comfortable talking about it and sharing these things. Back then, people took that to the grave, no one wanted to talk about it. Now we’re in a position where we can look back and reflect and talk about it without feeling shameful about these things.

Lars Berge in a still from ‘ELSA’ (Photo Credit: London Flair)

Rebecca, can you discuss the visual and stylistic choices you made to capture the atmosphere of that period, and how these choices contribute to the storytelling?

Rebecca: To be honest, I don’t have a lot of experience in you know, a director with a camera so there are some things technically that I still feel like I’m growing in but actually, where I started was within color. I knew, for, sure that I was tired of seeing war films that use brands and greens and things. So, I worked quite closely with Lauren Taylor who is an incredible production designer, really sensitive and injected color within the environment. Our costume designer and our hair and makeup department did the same. And then with our DOP Adam Singodia, it was similar to when we started looking at paintings, we looked at a lot of these Norwegian painters and artists that used a lot of incredible colors, I love looking at shapes and the use of the body. And this is one thing to flag I don’t speak Norwegian. So I was directing a film where I didn’t know the language. So we started a lot with like, from a very physical place and looking at shapes within people. So we started from, you know, the sense of paintings, that’s where we started and color. And that was our priority. Myself and Adam actually didn’t talk so much. We had a shortlist for every scene of how we would walk through. We had a good idea of the blocking, or how I wanted it to push the actors. But more so we spoke about light actually, our biggest kind of language was looking at how the daylight that came through else’s window would be something that everyone danced around and kept out of, and it would fall, just pass them or like skim their shoulder. Until, you know, in the build-up to the last scene people more and more coming into the daylight, which was this kind of like constant clean truth that everyone was kind of dancing around. So that was that was like the main approach was through paintings and lights.

ELSA will premiere at the Flickers Rhode Island International Film Festival in August 2024.