The near future in which the dystopian series takes place the fortress It is enough for the memory of the Covid-19 pandemic to be very present in people’s minds and to still guide decisions when dealing with a plague epidemic affecting the salmon farms on which the balance of Norway rests in 2037. On that date, this small hydrocarbon-rich country became one of the only habitable places in Europe, prey to climatic disasters, famine and civil wars, and completely closed its borders.
The idea for the series, discovered in France at the Séries Mania festival, where it received the script award in March 2023, came to its creators at the time of the migration crisis in the mid-2010s, long before the coronavirus paralyzed the world.
aggressive virus
“The Swedish Prime Minister [le social-démocrate Stefan Löfven] had asked its citizens to “open their hearts” to immigrants, recalls John Kare Raake, co-creator of the series with Linn-Jeanethe Kyed, whom he joined by video conference in Oslo. A year later, in 2015, she announced, in tears, that she would have to close the borders. That year, 120,000 refugees had arrived in Sweden – there were too many.
It was at this time that the idea of a wall that would isolate the country from the rest of the world also germinated in the minds of the scriptwriters. Norway is independent in terms of energy, but much less so in terms of food. In the series, the country’s food self-sufficiency required ten years of national effort and the help of agricultural researchers on whom the survival of the population depends.
An engineer, played by Selome Emnetu, thus becomes one of the only resources when salmon farms are decimated by an aggressive virus that can be transmitted to humans. “The Norway of the fortress She thinks she can do everything alone. That’s arrogance.”says John Kare Raake. From episode to episode, the celestial citadel closes in on its inhabitants and transforms into a prison.
Beyond the pandemic thriller Contagion (2011), by Steven Soderbergh, the fortress It also applies to their analysis of the limits of isolationism, which increasingly tempts democracies in the face of growing international dangers. The writers thus set the series in Bergen, the country’s second largest city and the point of entry of the Black Death into the country in the 14th century.my century, via an English ship.
In the fortressThis is about a British refugee who is wrongly suspected of having introduced the bacillus into the country. Her widower, Charlie (played by Russell Tovey, seen among others in a similarly themed series created by the British Russell T Davies, Years and yearsavailable on MyCanal), fights against the authorities so that the death of his wife is not used at the expense of asylum seekers.
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