Elsa Kvamme is an actress, director, and theater and film director.
For the first time, filmmaker Elsa Kvamme mixes documentary and dramatization — when she portrays the story of Ruth Maier and Gunvor Hofmo and their encounter with the persecution of Jews in Norway.
Thanks to these diaries, we can follow the experience of going from being an ordinary young girl to becoming a “Jew.” I have shown the film to young people, who are strongly affected. I hope “No more everyday life” will also be used in school. Ruth Maier was only 18 years old when she came to Norway and thought she was saved, Elsa Kvamme told NTBi in connection with the film’s first screening.
“No more everyday life” is Elsa Kvamme’s sixth war documentary project and the third she makes with the Norwegian Jewish deportation as a backdrop. She says that she has followed with increasing wonder the extent to which heroic stories and nationalism have influenced our stories from World War II and the silence about the advice about the story of the massacre of the Norwegian Jews – which she calls “one of the greatest disasters in recent Norwegian history,” wrote Dagsavisen on January 26 this year.
In his war documentaries, Kvamme has deliberately tried to address conspiracy theories – and how a clever idea can gain followers and win over audiences.
– A theory was launched that the Jews were evil. That non-Nazis agreed to it shocks me, and this has come up more and more in recent years. Finally, I would say, because this is the mother of racism in Norway, she says to NTB.
NRK shows Kvamme’s previous documentary, “The Tram to Auschwitz,” on International Holocaust Remembrance Day on 27 January. It is on NRK TV and has been watched by 1.2 million so far. “No more everyday life” will also be on NRK’s video streaming service. Later, it will also be shown at the Jewish Culture Festival in Trondheim in September. (Sources: NTB and Dagsavisen)
Elsa Kvamme was educated at Odinteatret in Denmark, where she had her acting debut in 1974. In 1977 she started the free theater group Saltkompagniet, where she worked as an actress and staged several performances until 1983. Later she created several solo theater performances, including Jacques Brel -cabarets Frederik (1985) and Da jeg var hest (1986, also recorded).