From an Oscar-winning Norwegian family drama to a deeply personal Faroese documentary, the six films competing for the 2026 Nordic Council Film Prize explore what remains when families, relationships and inherited certainties begin to fracture.
Six films have been nominated for the 2026 Nordic Council Film Prize, bringing together established international names, emerging filmmakers and only the second Faroese entry in the award’s history. The selection comprises five fiction features and one documentary. Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden are joined by the Faroe Islands, while Greenland has not submitted a film this year. The 21 nominated directors, screenwriters and producers will be formally presented at the Norwegian International Film Festival in Haugesund on 25 August.
The winner will be announced on 20 October, ahead of the Nordic Council’s award ceremony in Helsinki on 27 October.
The six nominated films
Denmark: Beginnings (Begyndelser)
Jeanette Nordahl’s Beginnings finds a marriage approaching its end just as illness makes separation immeasurably more complicated. Ane and Thomas are preparing to divorce when Ane suffers a blood clot. Thomas’s planned future with a new partner is suddenly suspended, while the couple and their two daughters must adapt to a family life transformed by crisis. Rather than treating illness as a convenient route towards reconciliation, Nordahl and co-writer Rasmus Birch examine the less orderly territory between resentment, duty, physical vulnerability and affection. The national jury praised a film that allows gestures and glances to carry its emotional weight, supported by performances from Trine Dyrholm and David Dencik. The nominated team consists of director and co-writer Jeanette Nordahl, writer Rasmus Birch and producers Eva Jakobsen, Katrin Pors and Mikkel Jersin.
Finland: A Light That Never Goes Out (Jossain on valo joka ei sammu)
Lauri-Matti Parppei’s feature debut places friendship, creativity and experimental music at the centre of a story about finding a way forward through art. The Finnish jury highlights the film’s strong sense of place and the apparently organic collaboration among its ensemble of young actors. Music is not simply part of the soundtrack: it becomes a language through which the characters process difficulties, build relationships and imagine alternatives. It is also one of the less conventionally prestigious-looking contenders in a field containing several internationally celebrated directors. That may be part of its strength. The Film Prize is intended not only to reward established achievement but also to help Nordic films circulate beyond their country of origin. Parppei is nominated as both director and screenwriter, alongside producer Ilona Tolmunen.
Faroe Islands: Birita
The only documentary in the 2026 competition is also its most ethically unsettling proposition. Directed by Búi Dam, Birita follows a Faroese family of theatre-makers as they attempt to stage Shakespeare’s King Lear. Dam’s mother Birita, an actress living with severe Alzheimer’s disease, is cast in the central role. The project places the filmmaker in an exceptionally difficult position. He is simultaneously a son, director and documentarian, while Birita’s condition raises unavoidable questions about consent and about the family’s right to transform her illness into art. Yet the film is not presented solely as a moral dilemma. Birita’s presence, her pleasure in performing and the unexpected freedom she finds beyond conventional memory reportedly bring warmth to a work that could otherwise have become unbearably sombre. Director Búi Dam and producers Jón Hammer, Durita Sumberg and Mark Steele are nominated. The selection follows the Faroe Islands’ historic first participation in 2025, when Sakaris Stórá’s The Last Paradise on Earth went on to win the prize.
Iceland: The Love That Remains (Ástin sem eftir er)
Families rarely separate cleanly in Hlynur Pálmason’s cinema. The Love That Remains observes a year in the lives of Anna and Magnús, a recently separated couple who continue to be connected through work, desire, memory and their three children. The film combines the everyday disorder of family life with Pálmason’s characteristically controlled visual language. Time-lapse photography, montage, split screens, home-video material and the director’s preferred 4:3 format register the passage of time without imposing a simple dramatic progression upon it. Landscape remains important, but it is not treated as an immaculate Icelandic spectacle. Instead, it frames a family whose emotional structure has changed without entirely disappearing. Pálmason, who previously represented both Denmark with Winter Brothers and Iceland with A White, White Day, is nominated as director and screenwriter. The nominated producers are Anton Máni Svansson and Katrin Pors.
Norway: Sentimental Value (Affeksjonsverdi)
Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value enters the competition as the obvious heavyweight. The film won the 2026 Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, Norway’s first victory in the category, after receiving nine Oscar nominations. Trier’s drama follows an ageing filmmaker attempting to reconnect with his two estranged daughters. What initially resembles another story about a difficult father gradually opens into a more complex examination of sisterhood, inherited wounds, artistic ambition and the question of who is expected to care for whom. Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgård and Elle Fanning may be the film’s most internationally familiar performers, but the Nordic Council jury particularly emphasised Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas and the emotional complexity she brings to the relationship between the two sisters. The film is distinctly Norwegian yet deliberately permeable: international performers and collaborators are incorporated without erasing its cultural specificity. That balance between local roots and global reach makes it an almost textbook contender for the Nordic Council prize. Trier is nominated as director and co-writer with Eskil Vogt. Producers Maria Ekerhovd and Andrea Berentsen Ottmar complete the nominated team.
Sweden: Kevlar Soul (Kevlarsjäl)
Maria Eriksson-Hecht’s feature debut turns to Eskilstuna and two brothers growing up in a home shaped by grief, alcoholism and violence. Following the death of their mother, Robin and Alex live with their father, a former military officer whose addiction embodies what the Swedish jury describes as the betrayal of the adult world. Their relationship becomes a form of protection, but it is repeatedly tested by love, anger and the restless physical energy of adolescence. The title comes from an early song by the Swedish band Kent, which was formed in Eskilstuna. The city’s post-industrial environment is more than a backdrop: it gives physical form to the social divisions surrounding the boys and to a generation at risk of being abandoned. Eriksson-Hecht is nominated alongside screenwriter Pelle Rådström and producers Ronny Fritsche and Lizette Jonjic.
Families under pressure
Despite their considerable stylistic differences, the six nominees appear to be engaged in a remarkably coherent Nordic conversation. Beginnings, The Love That Remains and Sentimental Value all examine families after their conventional structures have begun to collapse. Kevlar Soul looks at children left exposed by parental failure. Birita asks what love, care and artistic responsibility mean when memory and consent become uncertain. Even A Light That Never Goes Out, the selection’s clearest expression of youthful possibility, presents collective creativity as a response to emotional difficulty. These are not films about the secure, egalitarian North often presented to the outside world. They are about care when institutions and relationships cannot provide simple solutions. Their characters remain bound to one another not because harmony has been restored, but because affection, dependence and responsibility survive even after certainty has gone.
Is Sentimental Value the inevitable winner?
Its Oscar victory and international profile make Sentimental Value the clear favourite on paper. Joachim Trier has also won the Nordic Council Film Prize before, with Louder Than Bombs in 2016. However, the award does not simply reproduce the verdicts of larger international festivals and academies. Its criteria emphasise artistic originality, Nordic cultural roots and the ability to combine the elements of cinema into a compelling whole. That could favour the formal experimentation of The Love That Remains, the social intensity of Kevlar Soul or the extraordinary ethical and emotional territory occupied by Birita. The Faroese documentary may be the field’s outsider, but it is also the film whose existence seems least predictable—and perhaps the one that most directly tests what cinema is permitted to do.
A prize for collaboration and circulation
Established in 2002 and awarded annually since 2005, the Nordic Council Film Prize carries DKK 300,000. The money is shared among the winning director, screenwriter and producer, formally recognising cinema as a collaborative art. The prize also has a regional purpose: to encourage Nordic films to circulate across national borders and help the Nordic countries function more effectively as a shared cultural market. Screenings of the nominated films are planned in Haugesund, Nuuk, Helsinki, Aarhus, Tórshavn, Stockholm and Reykjavík between late August and mid-October. The winner will be revealed on 20 October, with the “Nordlys” statuette presented in Helsinki one week later.
Whatever the jury decides, the 2026 shortlist offers a persuasive snapshot of contemporary Nordic cinema: internationally confident, formally diverse and increasingly willing to look beyond the five sovereign states—while remaining preoccupied with the intimate structures of home, memory and belonging.
Suggested Online Sources
Nordic Council: 2026 nominees
Nordisk Film & TV Fond: Nordic Council Film Prize 2026
New Nordic Films: nominees and screening programme
AP: Sentimental Value wins Norway’s first International Feature Oscar
