IN DEFENSE OF SELF

Linn Helene Løken I 2026 NO I 87’ I Norwegian

“Gripping” - Cineuropa

Synopsis

On a December evening in 2020, after a stay at a psychiatric clinic, Morten contacts the emergency services to get help with his insomnia. Working on his personal issues, struggling with loneliness and stigma towards his addiction and mental illness, he lives with a feeling of constant rejection. Presumably, he enters a psychosis and triggers the fire alarm in his building. Within 13 minutes of the police arriving, they had broken down his door and shot him three times in his upper body. The police acted in self defense, as Morten had a knife. 

Morten is soon declared dead at the hospital, where they also find an audio recorder in his pocket, still recording. Morten has recorded his own death. 

Filmmaker Linn Helene Løken rewinds the audio recordings and shows a life in and out of psychiatric care. Through the police’s explanations and reconstructions of the killing, we gain an unusually intimate insight into the system surrounding him and into the complex and vulnerable person that Michelsen was.

‘In Defense of Self’ shows the encounter between psychiatry and the police and raises pressing questions about responsibility, the use of force, and structural failures. Løken has created an empathetic and politically urgent film unlike anything we have seen and not least heard before, and which calls for a conversation that is long overdue.

Festivals

CPH:DOX

Credits

Directed by Linn Helene Løken

Produced by Linn Helene Løken & Anika Miara, Morild Film AS (NO)

In collaboration with VGTV