A sharply observed new dramedy about returning home, finding love and navigating life where everyone knows everyone has been selected for Stockholm Industry Days’ Nordic Wave 2026.
A Faroese story of return
GØTUBRÁ, a new fiction series from the Faroe Islands, has been named one of five nominees for Nordic Wave 2026, Stockholm Industry Days’ pitch competition for emerging Nordic filmmakers. Directed by Anna Maria Sloan and Annika Djurhuus Olsen, the dramedy follows Helena, 31, who returns home thirteen years after leaving the islands to build a life abroad. She expects to settle down, perhaps find a partner and begin a family; instead, she finds herself living in the basement of her alcoholic father’s house, uncertain about what comes next and confronted by the familiar expectations of home.
Dating in a place where everyone knows everyone
Helena enters a dating pool shaped by the distinctive social geography of a community of around 50,000 people: someone may already have dated her sister or her friend, and a one-night stand may involve meeting his mother before breakfast. The premise offers fertile territory for comedy, but GØTUBRÁ is also concerned with sex, friendship, family, loneliness and the pressure placed on women in a small society where few decisions remain entirely private. The series draws on dating stories from the directors’ own lives and from people they know in the Faroes, giving its contemporary premise a personal and distinctly local foundation.
A Nordic co-production with a Faroese centre
GØTUBRÁ marks Sloan and Djurhuus Olsen’s first television series and has been developed with writer and assistant director Ylva Forner. Lucas Frayssinet and Rúna Volmarsdóttir Højgaard produce for Bloom Productions, with Motor Productions in Denmark and Anagram Productions in Norway as co-production partners. The collaboration reflects the way smaller Nordic screen industries can bring highly specific local voices to a wider audience without losing the texture of the place from which those stories emerge.
Pitching the next wave of Nordic cinema
The project will be pitched live at Nordic Wave during Stockholm Industry Days, part of the Stockholm International Film Festival. The competition gives directors developing their first, second or third long-format project the opportunity to present work to distributors, co-producers, festival programmers and other industry professionals. Taking place in Stockholm, Nordic Wave offers SEK 400,000 in post-production support in partnership with Tint; the winner will be announced at the festival’s awards ceremony at Soho House on 19 November. For GØTUBRÁ, the selection is an important early platform rather than a release announcement, but it signals an exciting possibility: a funny, candid and unapologetically Faroese series about the complicated business of belonging.
Suggested Online Sources
Stockholm International Film Festival — Meet the Filmmakers Nominated for Nordic Wave 2026; Stockholm Industry Days — Nordic Wave.
