Time to chase the winter blues away by reflecting on other places much colder with the 2026 Hurtigruten Nordic Film Festival beginning 22 July to 16 August at Palace Nova Cinemas.
This year’s Festival features a superb line up of films from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden relaying the Nordic traditions of storytelling and culture with always outstandingly beautiful landscapes.
The opening night film will be Árru which is the directorial debut by Elle Sofe Sar and is about a Sàmi reindeer herding family in northern Scandinavia who fight an encroaching mining project on their cultural lands but the return of a long lost uncle opens old family wounds. Mixed with the narrative are traditional songs (joik) and movement.
The Festival Centrepiece is Fjord, the winner of the Palme d’Or at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival starring Renate Reinsve (Sentimental Value) and Sebastian Stan (A Different Man). When a Norwegian Christian Romanian family move to a village next to a remote fjord the community becomes concerned when their adolescent daughter shows up to school with bruises on her body.
The Love that Remains is one of the Special Presentations, a drama/comedy which charts a year of a family of five as the parents come to terms with their separation and is by award-winning writer/director Hlynur Pálmason (Godland, A White, White Day).
The other Special Presentation will be Butterfly, which is about sisters who travel to the Canary Islands, where they grew up at a resort, after their mother’s mysterious death at the obscure retreat in the mountains.
Closing night will be Ingmar Bergman’s classic Persona in its 60th anniversary screening. In it, Liv Ullmann, is a screen actress who has become silent, while Bibi Andersson is a talkative young nurse assigned to her care.
Many other excellent films are also in this year’s program. For the special presentations and feature films, there is also a glass of wine or cocktail to be enjoyed before the films.
More information about the festival is available here; 2026 Hurtigruten Nordic Film Festival begins 22 July to 16 August at Palace Nova Cinemas
