Paul Greengrass takes on Norway’s deadliest terrorist attack in trailer for ’22 July’

Director Paul Greengrass is not one to shy away from difficult material. While he’s given us blockbusters in the Bourne franchise, he’s probably most known for his riveting and Oscar-nominated direction of United 93, the docudrama of the passengers who foiled one of the many terrorist attacks that hit the US on 9/11. Greengrass’s examination of 1972 shooting in Derry, Ireland in Bloody Sunday also shows his skill with telling stories of tragedy. 

22 July follows that theme and there probably isn’t a director working more adept at tackling this. Detailing the worst terrorist attack in Norway’s history, the film explores right-wing terrorist Anders Behring Breivik, who murdered 77 people on July 22, 2011, in attacks carried out with a car bomb in Oslo and a teen camp on the secluded island of Utøya.

At the film’s premiere at the Venice International Film Festival last week, Greengrass said:

Cinema embraces many forms and many subjects, but its theme is always our humanity. It can show us love and wonder, find truth and beauty in the smallest of private moments, or thrill and entertain us with magnificent spectacles of imagined worlds. But from time to time, cinema must also dare to look unflinchingly at the way the world is – how it is moving, where it is going, and how we can confront it. This is the reason I set out to tell the inspiring story of Norway’s response to the right-wing terrorist attack of 22 July 2011.

Greengrass also wrote the film, which is based on the book “One of Us: The Story of an Attack in Norway — and Its Aftermath,” by Asne Seierstad.

The film stars Anders Danielsen Lie, Jon Øigarden, Jonas Strand Gravli, Maria Bock, Thorbjørn Harr, Ola G. Furuseth, Seda Witt, and Isak Bakli Aglen.

Following its Venice and Toronto International Film Festival plays, Netflix will release 22 July globally on its streaming platform on October 10th as well as in select theaters.

Here is the trailer.

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Erik Anderson

Erik Anderson is the founder/owner and Editor-in-Chief of AwardsWatch and has always loved all things Oscar, having watched the Academy Awards since he was in single digits; making lists, rankings and predictions throughout the show. This led him down the path to obsessing about awards. Much later, he found himself in film school and the film forums of GoldDerby, and then migrated over to the former Oscarwatch (now AwardsDaily), before breaking off to create AwardsWatch in 2013.

He is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, accredited by the Cannes Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and more, is a member of the International Cinephile Society (ICS), The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics (GALECA), Hollywood Critics Association (HCA) and the International Press Academy. Among his many achieved goals with AwardsWatch, he has given a platform to underrepresented writers and critics and supplied them with access to film festivals and the industry and calls the Bay Area his home where he lives with his husband and son.

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