Escape plan
Norwegian drama Flukten fra Bolivia (Escaping Bolivia) tells the story of three friends caught up in drug-smuggling charges in the South American country. Creator Emilie Beck and producer Marte Hansen detail how the series was inspired by true events and discuss the production’s real-world impact.
If Emilie Beck hadn’t known better, she might have dismissed the story portrayed in Flukten fra Bolivia (Escaping Bolivia) as pure fiction. But for nearly a decade, the writer-director has been determined to bring to the screen a drama inspired by the extraordinary true events surrounding three young women accused of drug trafficking.
“It’s so bizarre, you can’t make these stories up,” she tells DQ. “It has to be a true story for it to actually make sense, because for so many of these things that happened, I would say, ‘No, no, this is not true. This would never happen.’ But it did.”
Commissioned by Norway’s TV2, Escaping Bolivia is a suspenseful six-part thriller that introduces Ida (Ella Øverby), her sister-in-law Michelle (Josephine Tetlie), and her girlfriend Cecilie (Lisa Marie Hovden), who are arrested in Bolivia and thrown into a brutal women’s prison after being accused of smuggling cocaine.
Abandoned by authorities and surrounded by betrayal, Ida’s only hope of freedom lies in a daring escape plan from unlikely allies – a men’s magazine journalist and a mercenary. But as she ventures into the deadly jungles of South America with her newborn baby in her arms, one question remains: will she make it out alive, or will the jungle become her final prison?
Jakob Oftebro and Ingvild Lien also star in the series, which is produced by Fenomen and 4½. It debuted in Norway in December, and has also been picked up by DR in Denmark, YLE in Finland, Sweden’s TV4 and NDR in Germany.
Beck was just 16 when she watched the real drug-trafficking case unfold on the news, and has remained “super fascinated” by what happened to the three young women involved. Then nine years ago, she began to research the story, even travelling to Bolivia on a couple of occasions, as she began to formulate a screenplay based on what happened.
“The thing is there are so many different takes on what happened, so we made a fictionalised story,” she says. “But a lot of things are from the [real] case – and the prison [set] looks amazing. It really looks like a mix of all the Bolivian prisons in one, and also the colours and the look of the series is very non-Scandinavian. It’s very different from what we’ve seen before.”
That the show took so long to complete, however, came down to Beck’s inexperience making television at the time she started work on Escaping Bolivia. “It took many years to just get someone to actually believe that it could be made, and that I could be the creator of that kind of size of show,” she says. It also took some time to finance the series, with Reinvent Studios joining the production as distributor.
“But it’s a luxury to have five years working on a script. We really turned every stone that could possibly be turned.”
What fascinated Beck most about the true story behind Escaping Bolivia were the friendships between the three young women – and how they quickly crumbled under the pressure of such an intense situation, leading them to start looking out for themselves rather than each other collectively.
“That’s what really drew me into the whole story, their relationship, and how they managed to go from love to hate,” she says. In fact, so rich was the story that she might have liked 10 episodes to tell it. But even with six episodes, “getting this up and running was the hardest part, the financing, and to get it done.”
Beck wrote the series with Helena Nielsen and Ingrid Haukelidsæter, with the story primarily following Ida’s perspective, as well as that of her mother at home in Norway and Joakim (Ostebro), a journalist who publicises her case.
“We follow those three storylines and then we also go back in time. Maybe we’ll find out what really happened in our story in the end,” Beck teases of the show, which begins in 2008 and follows the four years Ida spends in prison in Bolivia before she makes her escape into the jungle. Along the way, the girls’ friendship begins to fray as they face numerous court appearances and Ida gives birth to a son, leaving her to rely on Joakim and mercenary Tommy (Joachim Fjelstrup).
Working with a budget of just over US$7.5m, filming largely took place in South Africa, where production designer Mike Berg constructed the show’s prison at a youth centre in Cape Town, basing it on elements of a number of real prisons in Bolivia. Some footage was also captured in Norway and Bolivia, with a Bolivian consultant working to ensure the series was as authentic as possible. Numerous languages, including Norwegian, Spanish, English, Portuguese, Danish and German, also appear.
“To me, it was very important that it’s not all English spoken with an accent,” Beck says. “It’s very important to me that it feels authentic.”
“We were really lucky to shoot in South Africa, and we had an amazing team locally,” says producer Marte Hansen. “And we had a great team in Bolivia as well, run by [second unit line producer] Elizabeth Salazar, getting the visuals and those elements that are key to making the story believable.”
Hansen explored the possibility of filming Escaping Bolivia in Eastern Europe or Latin America, among other regions, before it was decided that South Africa provided the perfect balance of production quality and value for money. “Those are the challenges we all have these days,” she says. “Having creatives who take responsibility for that and use financial limitation as a creative space, that’s the future we’re heading into. That’s where Emilie, and also our conceptual director, Anna, has been really great. Limitation expands creativity.”
But making a series that covers several hundred story days, “our continuity department had a lot of work on their hands,” the producer says. “I think there was one [occasion] that we had 10 to 15 story days in one shooting day.”
As lead director, Anna Gutto shot the first three episodes, with Beck picking up the final three. Between them and cinematographer Malin Gutke, they landed on a visual style that followed the characters and locations in different ways, from a stable, controlled Norway to a more handheld, chaotic approach when the girls are arrested.
“Then we follow them a lot more intuitively, in a very cinematic way. The lights and colours were also a very big part of it,” Beck says. “I directed four to six, when our main character gets very depressed and into her own head. We got very close to her, and then we changed the style a bit after she gets her sentence. It was so much fun to work like that.”
“There was a vision from Emilie and Anna to also work with a predominantly female crew. We had two female DOPs. We have female directors, producers. This project is surrounded by women,” Hansen says, “and for a lot of people, it’s the first time they’ve been on a set that is run by so many women. That was part of the ambition, because it is also a female story, to have that reflected behind the camera.”
“This is a story that should be created by women, because it is about three young women, and it’s about motherhood, class and white privilege,” says Beck. “It’s about friendship and betrayal. It had to be handled by women – and also a lot of amazing men that we worked with. But it was just so incredibly fun to see. I’ve never been on a set like that.”
Production was a collaborative affair all round, not least for the supporting artists playing the show’s numerous prisoners. They were each assigned a prison job and had their own bunk, and were all given different backgrounds – an approach that Hansen says made shooting the series feel like a documentary.
“The extras were a huge part of our cast and crew. That was really important for us, and they are key to making this believable,” Beck says. They were also an example of the impact the series had on the cast and crew.
“A really fascinating thing is that the extras came together and worked with an organisation that works with women in prison in South Africa, which we also, as a production, donated to,” Hansen says. “It leaves a little bit of an impact after your shoot, and that says something about the meaningful experience we all had making this together.”
“People were very drawn to the story, and I feel like we were all in it together,” Beck adds. “When it’s inspired by a true story, it really hits you a bit harder than if it was just fiction.”
Like that? Watch this! Suggested by AI, selected by DQ
Vis a Vis (Locked Up): A naïve young woman is manipulated into financial fraud for her lover and ends up in a brutal women’s prison, where she must adapt fast to gang factions, guards corruption and a possible escape route.
Hinter Gittern: Wrongly convicted of murder, a woman enters a high-security women’s facility where drug dealing, protection rackets and power struggles between inmates and guards make every decision a potential death sentence.
Braquers (Ganglands): A seasoned thief and his teenage niece are pulled into a Paris cocaine network, exposing how low-level couriers, family loyalties and brutal enforcement intersect in a trade where one mistake can be fatal.
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tagged in: 4½, Emilie Beck, Escaping Bolivia, Fenomen, Flukten fra Bolivia, Marte Hansen, Reinvent Studios, TV2