Winner of the Camera d’Or at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival, the sui generis Northern Lights marks one of the most moving and committed works of political cinema from the late 1970s. Dramatizing the formation of the populist Nonpartisan League in North Dakota in the mid-1910s, Northern Lights captures the plight of immigrant Dakotan farmers as they toil and struggle against the combined forces of industry and finance. Amid this paroxysm of class tension, two young lovers find themselves swept up in the tide. Shot on location (on grain-rich black-and-white 16mm) in the dead of winter and featuring an astonishing cast of non-professional actors, this handmade masterpiece remains a stirring monument to collectivity.
Laemmle Theatres will open the restored Northern Lights June 13 at the Royal. The latest episode of Inside the Arthouse will feature the film.
Restoration Credits
IndieCollect produced the new 4K restoration for Kino Lorber. It was created by scanning the 35mm Fine Grain Master Positive in 6.5K. Color correction by Jason Crump of Metropolis was personally supervised by co-director John Hanson. Special thanks to Mike Pogorzelski & Josef Lindner of the Academy Film Archive for their cooperation. The 4K restoration was funded by Kino Lorber, IndieCollect donor John Ahlgren, and additional support from the Golden Globe Foundation and Donald A. Pels Charitable Trust.
About the Production
Northern Lights was filmed from 1975 to 1977 in northwestern North Dakota near the Canadian border in an area settled by Norwegian immigrants, some of whom still spoke their homeland dialect at the time of production.
Back in 1915, small farmers banded together to organize the Nonpartisan League, the grassroots movement that is the backdrop for the film’s love story. Their descendants threw their full support behind the production. Co-Directors John Hanson and Rob Nilsson cast many of them in speaking roles alongside lead actors Robert Behling, Joe Spano and Susan Lynch. Acting for the first time in scripted roles, these rural folk gave the film a gritty authenticity in the tradition of the Italian Neorealist film movement. Made for just over $300,000 with a small crew from San Francisco, Northern Lights was a production of Cine Manifest, the film collective that Hanson and Nilsson had co-founded.
Filmed in stark black and white, Northern Lights captures the stunning imagery of the High Plains landscape, its farmers silhouetted against the immense northern sky. Widely acclaimed for its cinematography, it was shot in 16mm and was one of the first independent films to be blown up to 35mm at the DuArt Film Lab. After its 1978 world premiere at the Dakota Theater in Crosby, North Dakota, Hanson, Nilsson and Associate Producer Sandra Schulberg took the movie to the 1979 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the prestigious Camera d’Or Award for Best First Feature.
The Cannes Festival recognition led to other festivals. It won the Grand Prize at the Portugal International Film Festival and Special Jury Awards at the U.S. Film Festival (the forerunner to Sundance) and at Houston’s WorldFest. At the 1979 New York Film Festival, Northern Lights was shown opening night of the Festival’s “American Independents” sidebar.
Initially, Hanson, Nilsson and Schulberg distributed Northern Lights themselves, going theater to theater throughout the Dakotas and Upper Midwest. In 1980, with filmmakers Maxi Cohen, Joel Gold, Deborah Shaffer, Stewart Bird, Glenn Silber & Barry Brown, they founded First Run Features, hiring veteran Fran Spielman from New Yorker Films to get their films book in theaters across the U.S.
In 1982, for the second season of the PBS “American Playhouse” series, Lindsay Law acquired the broadcast rights to Northern Lights and it won the Neil Simon Award for Best Dramatic Screenplay. It has since been acclaimed worldwide as one of the best American Independent movies of all time.