Thomas Østbye

Two ladies in a room: A casting agent and an actress. This hybrid documentary deals with empathy, acting and authenticity. Marie starts: When I enter into a role, I imagining that every individual has a core, with the same potential emotional life.

A character is passing time in a desolate beach town. Slowly, the loneliness and alienation she experiences in the foreign town makes her enter into an uncanny delusional realm, that blurs the memory of her own experiences with that of female protagonists from film history.

Roza's song gives a unique insight into the Norwegian-Romanian community. The film follows Roza's dream of making the Norwegian-Romanian community's first CD.

The documentary film HUMAN study what’s human – out of context. Without familiar purposes and surroundings, the film plays our labeling instinct against the factual meeting with another person. How close can we get to another human before it gets inhuman, – or maybe too human?

Emanuel's identity is unknown, and his life has been put on hold for eight years. He claims to be from Liberia, but the Norwegian authorities believes he's from Ghana. He can't be returned to a country he's not registered in.

The country is locked down during the corona pandemic and a lonely woman fantasizes about a brand new neighbor she has not yet met.

In 'Out of Norway' Emanuel (from Imagining Emanuel 2011) is refused to travel from Norway back to Liberia. So now he must flee again - in the other direction! Follow his video diary, and you will see that it is not as simple as it seems.

Civil Disobedience takes you along when three generations of activists from Extinction Rebellion and Just Stopp Oil change their tactics from actions against jet fuel to roadblocks and “attacks” on famous artworks and sports events. This observational documentary invites you behind the scenes of direct actions, and emotional and strategic reconsiderations. It gives you insight into the motivation of the actions as activists are prosecuted and taken to court. When the police move in, the filmmaker himself is arrested while cameras are rolling. An intense and empathic depiction of the here-and-now of the activists, the film also offers a larger perspective: What drives ordinary people into using civil disobedience and taking on the state and corporate powers to fight the climate emergency?

6 Conceptions of Freedom is a study of Alexander Kiellands plass in Oslo, looking at the social and physical frames of imagination. Its a documentary that explores loneliness and powerlessness in our ideal of freedom. Is freedom a question of uncertainty or happiness, action or condition?

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Direct Cinema study of the first Norwegian Climate Lawsuit and the hard hitting Supreme Court ruling. In this case environmental organizations sued the Norwegian state over petroleum licensing in the Barents sea.

Documenting a phone call to the "Norwegian directorate of immigration", this film is about a group of asylum seekers that have been six years in Norway without basic human rights.

Things is an attempt to approach the world without filling it up with preconceived ideas and purposes. An attempt to film things, without reducing them into mere means to build a story or statement. Things is on one hand a series of seemingly objective recordings without subject or superstructure, on the other hand it is Østbye’s most intimate and personal work, with no official theme or story to hide behind.