Notam’s contribution to the Ultima Festival 2026 is The Blood Path by Knut Olaf Sunde. The Blood Path is an essayistic concert film, which will have its world premiere at Vega Scene on 17 September 2026.

Music for a landscape that bears its dead. 

In July 1942, a ship docked at Rognan with Yugoslav prisoners of war on board. A year later, one of them, Miloš Banjac, was shot and killed by the roadside. His brother Marjan painted a cross on the mountain with his blood. The residents of Rognan still repaint it, so that everyone driving past is reminded of what happened. 

Thousands of Yugoslav prisoners held by Nazi Germany were sent to Norway during the war to build roads. The work was brutal. In some of the Norwegian camps, the mortality rate was on a par with the worst in Europe. The Blood Path is a concert film that travels through this landscape – from the air, by car and on foot – and asks what it means to pass through a place without knowing what happened there. 

Three video channels trace the paths and ruins left behind by the camps. A quiet, textual narrative runs alongside archive maps and photographs, evoking fragments of lives that were cut short. The electronic soundtrack builds up slowly from material recorded on site, with drones, ambient noise and soundscapes that convey the weight of the landscape.  

On stage, cellist Tanja Orning expands the sonic landscape with textures that blend seamlessly with the recorded soundtrack, without resolution. 

Read more and book tickets here.

Film and music  
Knut Olaf Sunde 

Cello  
Tanja Orning 

In co-operation with 
Vega Scene, Ultima and Notam