More than ten years after the most violent attack in Norway, a documentary collects the words of survivors. The Planète+ Crime channel broadcasts the film on Monday evening The Utøya Massacre, devoted to the attack committed by Anders Behring Breivik on July 22, 2011. The far-right activist had detonated a car bomb in front of the government headquarters in Oslo, before opening fire on a camp of young workers on the island of Utøya. A total of 77 people died in this massacre.
The difficulty of convincing victims to testify
To make this documentary, director Maud Vasquez interviewed five survivors who were present on this island. “I went through a Norwegian association and then I had to phone several times to several survivors, I presented the project to them as honestly as possible”, she explains at the microphone of Europe 1, underlining how much he has been difficult to convince the victims to come back to these terrible moments.
“They had a lot, a lot of reluctance at the start,” she points out, “I had to really reassure them that it wouldn’t be a reenactment, that it wouldn’t be Americanized, that I will really be in their human feelings, and on the after”, explains Maud Vasquez. “On site, I gained a new stage of trust with them by renting a house there. All the survivors came to this house, we ate together, we got to know each other there”, specifies the director on Europe 1.
Many emotions during the interviews
In the film, the five survivors come back to the unfolding of events and the survival instinct they developed on the day when their lives changed. But these victims, who are now in their thirties, also tell of their fight to rebuild themselves. Maud Vasquez felt a lot of emotions during these interviews.
“On my first phone call with Torje, whose brother was shot in the head, he told me that he had just gone to the island alone, that he had returned to the cave where he hid,” says the director. “He was talking to me about a kind of rebirth, he had reclaimed the place. He felt safe again where he had not been. I immediately thought of the Bataclan and the queues that the ‘we see concert evenings today. The survivors have a capacity to make the most obscure solar, “says Maud Vasquez.
The documentary is broadcast Monday evening at 9 p.m. on Planète+ Crime, available with the Canal+ bouquet offer, and it will also be possible to find it on the MyCanal platform.