Description
THE BATTLE FOR TUNGSVANNET (1948)
Kampen om tungvannet (1948) is a rare and unique bird in Norwegian filmography. Many in the film play themselves in a film that is a dramatization, but almost documentary in style, in an actual reconstruction of what is probably the world's most famous act of sabotage in 1943 during the Second World War, which prevented Hitler's Germany from gaining in the heavy water for nuclear weapons production. Five of the saboteurs didn't want to think about a war film, but Johannes Eckhoff, Claus Wiese, Andreas Aabel, Odd Rohde and Henki Kolstad stepped in and played them. By the way, Knut Haugland had agreed to Thor Heyerdahl to be a telegraph operator on board Kont-Tiki, so he had a valid reason to decline, which ended with an Oscar statuette! Øyvind Øyen played Professor Leif Tronstad, who was tragically shot by Nazi collaborators just before the end of the war. Otherwise, most people play themselves, down to ministers and professors. It became the great Norwegian war film after the war, and by far the best known outside Norway as well, and won two awards at the Venice film festival. It is also the first Norwegian film to receive a major remake in Heroes of Telemark (1965) and later one of the most expensive TV series of all time with the same name (2015). Here is not the story about the action, but about the special film about the action that still draws hordes of tourists to Vemork in Rjukan. There you can experience the action where it happened, after the blasted heavy water cellar was unearthed, again in 2018.
Ole Jon Tveito (55), is naturally from Rjukan, an editor and has been a media man and journalist all his adult life, and has worked as a librarian and with everything from TV, radio, newspaper, film, photo multimedia and computer security to media education. But most of all in this context, he is a film buff with 15,000 registered films, of which over 70% of total Norwegian film production.