Historien om en gut was filmed during the summer of 1918 and premiered in Norway in April 1919. The director and producer Peter Lykke-Seest (1868-1948) was a well-known Norwegian author who had written books in various genres since making his debut with a collection of poetry in 1896. At the beginning of the 1910s he started to write film scripts, mainly for the larger film companies in Sweden and Denmark. Some of his manuscripts were filmed by the leading Swedish directors Victor Sjöström and Mauritz Stiller. In 1916 Lykke-Seest established his own film company, Christiania Film Co., in Norway. As the first and only Norwegian film producer prior to 1935 he also built his own studio in Oslo. During the years from 1916 to 1919 he produced and partly directed nine feature films and some short documentaries. After he ceased producing and directing films in 1919, he returned to writing books.
Historien om en gut is the only of his feature films that still exists. It was one of three films made by the company to feature a child as the main character. The director’s son Esben, who was 13 years old in 1918, plays the leading role of a boy who is falsely accused of stealing his teacher’s watch. Subsequently, he decides to run away both from school and from home. On his travels he meets a lot of people and experiences many dangerous situations before he can return safely home. The film reached a limited distribution outside Norway, and a copy of the film was found many years later in Czechoslovakia. Even though the film looks almost complete today and the story is easy to follow, between a third and a quarter of it is probably still missing. There is no further information available about the missing scenes and how the story originally developed when the film premiered in 1919.

Øivind Hanche