Svend Wam

Svend Wam has extensive experience as a writer, director and producer, and is one of Norways most experienced film professionals. He studied at both Fotoskolan and Dokumentärfilmskolan in Stockholm, and made his debut as a feature film director with the drama Five Days in August in 1973. He also produced documentaries for the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation NRK for some years during the seventies.

In 1975 he directed the feature film Them and Us based on his own original screenplay, winning him the The Norwegian Film Critics Award. During production he met Petter Vennerød with whom he then produced The Silent Majority in 1977 and established the production companu Mefistofilm. Since then Wam primarily worked as one half of a directing duo with Vennerød, before long becoming household names simply as 'Wam & Vennerød', a moniker which has become somewhat of a term in itself, and a staple in Norwegian film history when referring to the predominance of social-realist dramas and comedies in Norwegian cinema of the late seventies and early eighties. Wam & Vennerød had a high creative output, and wrote, produced and directed close to one feature film a year during the eighties and much of the nineties. Their films have been invited to and screened at numerous festivals around the world, and many of them have received both national and international awards.

Norsk Filminstitutt