22 July (2018) — Read, Study & Download the Screenplay
A devastating true-story drama about terror, survival, justice, and a democracy refusing to break.
22 July dramatizes the 2011 Norway attacks carried out by Anders Behring Breivik, beginning with the bombing of Oslo’s government district before moving to the horrific mass shooting at the Labour Party youth camp on Utøya Island. Written by Paul Greengrass and based on Åsne Seierstad’s One of Us, the screenplay follows multiple strands of the tragedy: the attack itself, Viljar Hanssen’s fight to survive and recover, Geir Lippestad’s difficult role as defense counsel, and Norway’s attempt to answer political violence through law rather than vengeance.
For writers and film students, this screenplay is a powerful study in restraint, structure, and moral perspective. Greengrass avoids turning trauma into spectacle by anchoring the story in process: emergency response, medical care, family grief, legal procedure, psychological recovery, and public testimony. The result is not simply a terrorism drama. It is a story about what survives after violence: institutions, families, memory, and the fragile but necessary belief that justice must remain larger than rage.
22 July Study Notes
What writers and film students can learn from this screenplay
At its core, 22 July is a study in how a society absorbs an act of political violence without allowing that violence to define its moral response. The screenplay begins with procedural precision: a perpetrator preparing, teenagers arriving at camp, government officials managing ordinary duties, and families moving through a normal day. That cross-cutting creates dread not through melodrama, but through contrast. Ordinary life continues until it is violently interrupted. From there, Greengrass widens the lens, following the attack, the emergency response, Viljar’s survival, Lippestad’s legal burden, the families’ grief, and the courtroom reckoning. The screenplay’s power comes from refusing to make any single strand the whole story. Trauma becomes national, personal, legal, political, and ethical all at once.
Craft Focus
- Multi-strand structure: The screenplay moves between victim, perpetrator, family, lawyer, doctors, police, and government without losing emotional clarity.
- Restraint under pressure: The attack sequences are direct and harrowing, but the writing avoids exploitation by keeping focus on confusion, fear, survival, and consequence.
- Procedural storytelling: Emergency calls, hospital treatment, police decisions, legal meetings, psychiatric assessments, and courtroom testimony all become engines of drama.
- Recovery as narrative: Viljar’s rehabilitation gives the second half of the screenplay a physical and emotional spine, turning survival into an active struggle rather than a passive outcome.
- Democracy as theme: The legal defense, courtroom process, victim testimony, and Prime Minister’s response all test whether Norway’s institutions can hold under immense moral pressure.
- Antagonist containment: Breivik is central to the story, but the screenplay carefully denies him heroic scale. His ideology is examined, challenged, and diminished by the human lives he tried to erase.
Questions for Writers
- How does the screenplay create suspense when the audience already knows the historical outcome?
- Why does Greengrass begin with ordinary routines before the attacks, and how does that choice deepen the tragedy?
- How does the script balance multiple protagonists without making the story feel scattered?
- What makes Viljar’s recovery arc dramatically necessary to the film’s larger argument about survival?
- How does Lippestad’s role complicate the audience’s understanding of justice, duty, and democratic principle?
- Where does the screenplay use silence, procedure, or aftermath more powerfully than dialogue?
- How does the courtroom section transform private trauma into public testimony?
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22 July (2018)
After devastating terror attacks in Norway, a young survivor, grieving families and the country rally for justice and healing. Based on a true story.
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