The frustrations of youth are exacerbated by the film being set in Skoddeheimen, a small town in western Norway, where nothing ever happens and everybody knows everybody else’s business. While many might look at the idyllic beauty that surrounds it and see utopia, for Alma and her best friend Sara, it is a boring and suffocating place they are dying to get out of. It’s no coincidence that their clubhouse is a bus shelter at the furthest periphery of town. “I think of the bus shelter as being at the edge of civilization,” says Systad Jacobsen. “It’s a metaphor for leaving Skoddeheimen—on one side of the bus shelter is hell and on the other there is freedom.”

Skoddeheimen doesn’t exist in actuality, but is similar to Solheimsdalen in the county Sogn og Fjordane, where Olaug Nilssen grew up. “It’s supposed to be anywhere in Norway that is dominated by tall mountains, dark fjords and fog,” says Systad Jacobsen. (In the nynorsk dialect of the area, “Skodde” is a word for fog, “Heimen” means homestead.) The filmed “Skoddeheimen” was a composite of various locations in the county of Rogaland.

Systad Jacobsen wanted her young actors to have grown up in the same kind of isolated towns as their characters, and to speak the specific Sogn og Fjordane dialect. As the surrounding areas are sparsely populated, she and casting director Ellen Michelsen did open casting calls for the five lead roles in all the junior high and high schools in the county of Sogn og Fjordane. Over a period of four months, they auditioned 450 teenagers, not a large selection for casting five roles, but a significant percentage of the 100,000 residents of Sogn og Fjordane.