Marius Holst

Norwegian film director Marius Holst studied his craft in London in the late 1980s and graduated in 1990. His first short film "Visiting Hours" went on to win several prizes in both England and Norway. In 1994 his debut feature film "Cross My Heart and Hope to Die," a coming-of-age thriller, was released and also won an award, this time from the prestigious Berlin International Film Festival. The film garnered the director plenty of worldwide recognition, though he spent the next few years making commercials and working in television. He returned to feature filmmaking with the 2001 release "Dragonfly," another dark drama. "Mirush," released in 2007, focuses on a Kosovo boy who journeys to Norway to find his father. Holst had spent time in Kosovo in the late '90s and based his film partly on the story a young man who told him about his own absent father. Holst is also the director of the harrowing prison drama "King of Devil's Island," starring Stellan Skarsgård, about a group of teenage prisoners locked in a brutal struggle for survival at a reform school. Things change, however, when a new prisoner enters the fray and leads the other boys into rebellion against the tyrannical head of the school. The film is based on a true story.