Director: Nils Gaup
High above Norway's Arctic Circle, a company town explodes into open conflict in The Riot, a 2023 historical drama from director Nils Gaup.
What is The Riot about?
Set in 1907 in Sulitjelma, a remote mining outpost in Fauske, the film follows workers pushed to their limit by mine owners who control every wage and ration. When conditions become unbearable, the miners organize and rise up, turning a company dispute into one of Norway's most talked-about labor uprisings. Otto Fahlgren leads an ensemble that includes Alexandra Gjerpen, Mads Sjogard Pettersen, and Stig Henrik Hoff as the story moves between the mine shafts, the company offices, and the households caught in between. Running 107 minutes, the film treats the strike as both a personal reckoning and a communal one, asking what ordinary workers are willing to risk once negotiation stops working.
Cast & crew
Fahlgren anchors the film as a miner drawn into leadership he never sought, while Gjerpen and Pettersen give the uprising its emotional stakes at home. Sofia Jannok and Heidi Ruud Ellingsen round out a cast that keeps the focus on the community rather than a single hero.
Context & significance
The Riot revisits a real chapter of Norwegian industrial history, when isolated mining communities in the north had little legal protection and even less bargaining power. Gaup, known for grounding period material in physical, lived-in detail, favors location shooting and practical staging over spectacle, which keeps the 1907 setting feeling close rather than distant. The Sulitjelma mines themselves were among the largest employers in northern Norway at the time, and the film uses that scale to show how quickly a local wage dispute could pull in an entire town, from the pit face to the kitchen table.
Where & how to watch
The Riot streams on K-Time with Persian dubbing and Persian subtitles, so Iranian diaspora viewers can follow the Sulitjelma uprising in Farsi. The film's page is free to read without an account; watching it requires signing in with a free K-Time login, inside a Farsi-first interface built for Persian-speaking audiences.