The near future in which the dystopian series takes place The Fortress is enough so that the memory of the Covid-19 pandemic is still fresh in people’s minds and still guides decisions when it comes to dealing with a plague epidemic affecting the salmon farms on which the balance of Norway in 2037 depends. At that time, this small country rich in hydrocarbons has become one of the only habitable places in Europe, prey to climate disasters, hunger and civil wars, and has completely closed its borders.
The idea for the series, discovered in France at the Séries Mania festival, where it received the Screenplay Prize in March 2023, came to its creators at the time of the migration crisis in the mid-2010s, well before the coronavirus paralyzed the world.
Aggressive virus
“The Swedish Prime Minister [le social-démocrate Stefan Löfven] had asked its citizens to “open their hearts” to migrants, recalls John Kare Raake, co-creator of the series with Linn-Jeanethe Kyed, reached by videoconference in Oslo. A year later, in 2015, he announced, in tears, that he had to close the borders. One hundred and twenty thousand refugees had arrived in Sweden that year, it was too many.
It was at this point that the idea of a wall that would isolate the country from the rest of the world also germinated in the writers’ heads. Independent from an energy point of view, Norway is, however, much less so when it comes to its food supply. In the series, the country’s food self-sufficiency required ten years of national effort, and the help of agricultural researchers on whom the survival of the population depends.
An engineer, played by Selome Emnetu, thus becomes one of the only recourses when salmon farms are decimated by an aggressive virus that can be transmitted to humans. “Norway of The Fortress thinks she can do everything on her own. That’s hubris.”said John Kare Raake. From episode to episode, the heavenly citadel closes in on its inhabitants and turns into a prison.
Read also the review | Article reserved for our subscribers “The Fortress”, on Canal+: the salmonids of the apocalypse
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Beyond the pandemic thriller Contagion (2011), de Steven Soderbergh, The Fortress is also valid for its analysis of the limits of isolationism, which increasingly tempts democracies in the face of rising international dangers. The scriptwriters have thus set the series in Bergen, the country’s second city and which was the point of entry of the Black Death into the country in the 14th century.e century, via an English ship.
In The Fortressshe is a British refugee who is wrongly suspected of having brought the bacillus into the country. Her widower, Charlie (played by Russell Tovey, seen among others in a series with a similar theme created by the British Russell T Davies, Years and Yearsavailable on MyCanal), is fighting against the authorities so that his wife’s death is not used to the detriment of asylum seekers.
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