Two years ago Visit Oslo found the rarest thing in tourism marketing: a character people actually wanted to see again. Halfdan, the deadpan local who spent “Is It Even a City?” talking tourists out of coming, racked up more than 25 million organic views across platforms and a Cannes Lions silver, according to VisitOSLO and NewsLab. We covered that film in 2024. Now he is back, still living in Oslo, still unimpressed, and this time he has to suffer through winter.
“It’s Totally Even a City,” posted on the official Visit OSLO YouTube channel on October 9, 2026, runs 3:23. NewsLab made it and August Jorfald, who directed the original, directs again. The twist is the format: the sequel is, more or less, a musical.
WHAT HAPPENS ON SCREEN
A super introduces “Halfdan (33), still an Oslo resident,” standing in front of the Opera House while cold-water bathers queue for a floating sauna behind him. “I hate the winter in Oslo,” he says. He does not mind the cold; the problem is that everything becomes so cozy. It feels, he says, “a bit like a cult,” like living in “some kind of creepy fairytale.”
The tour of grievances is a tour of the product. Christmas lights over a shopping street. A tree in a square. A stave church. A horse-drawn sleigh in low golden sun. Office workers gliding home on cross-country skis between glass towers – you would never see bankers do that on Wall Street, Halfdan notes. “They say it’s therapeutical. I say they’re all delusional.” Then the trap springs: “Like they’re living in a musical.” The locals start singing, and the film never stops.
From there it escalates through sledding parks, a crowd on park benches belting out “Oslo,” a ski jump, a boom mic and a crew member wandering into frame as Halfdan quits, and a taxi: “The airport, please.” He does not get there. A candle-holding children’s choir in a snowy forest, a log-cabin waiter, and a white hare in front of a wall of flames all pull him back, before a dusk crowd number and a final night scene on a bench. “I guess I could consider staying one more week.” Northern lights, Visit Oslo logo.
CREDITS
Client: VisitOSLO. Film: “It’s totally even a city!”, 3:23, on the official Visit OSLO YouTube channel (@visitoslo). Production company: NewsLab, the Oslo-based marketing agency behind the 2024 original. Director: August Jorfald. Quoted in the launch material: Thea Gunnes, head of communications and marketing at VisitOSLO, and Linn Isaksen, adviser and managing director of NewsLab. Not credited in any source we found: the actor playing Halfdan, the composer and lyricist, the cinematographer, the editor and the media agency.
THE EXECUTION
Sequels are where tourism campaigns go to die. The safe move was the same monologue with snow on it, and the launch material admits it: Gunnes says the hardest film to make is often the second one, and Isaksen says the team did not want to make the same film again in winter scenery. The musical is the right kind of risk. It keeps Halfdan’s dry voice as the engine, but gives the film a new shape: he is no longer just the narrator of the city, he is a hostage to it.
It also sharpens the reverse-psychology joke. In the first film, Halfdan’s complaints were the sales pitch. Here, his complaints are the plot, and the city literally answers back in song. That is a smarter way to sell winter than a montage, because the things he hates – coziness, light, sleds, saunas, skiing after work – are exactly the reasons to book. The product truth is solid: Oslo in winter really is a city where nature starts at the end of the metro line, and the film rarely has to exaggerate to make the point.
The craft is polished in the right places. Jorfald keeps Halfdan in centered, static compositions, which makes the chaos around him funnier. The light is gorgeous – low winter sun, blue dusk, a black-and-gold night – and burned-in captions keep it watchable with the sound off.
WHAT WORKS AND WHAT DOESN’T
What works: the character is intact, the format shift is genuine, and the visible boom mic and the deadpan “The airport, please” give the film the self-aware texture that made the original travel. The ending is a perfect sequel button: not a conversion, just one more week.
What doesn’t: at 3:23 it is long, and the musical pivot burns some of Halfdan’s best weapon, understatement. The original worked because he barely raised his voice; here the songs do the talking, and the middle stretch – forest choir, hare, flames – drifts from funny to merely strange. And the joke now depends on knowing the first film; newcomers may just see a grumpy man in earmuffs wandering through a very long ad.
VERDICT
“It’s Totally Even a City” does the hard thing well: it avoids remaking a viral hit and finds a new format that still belongs to the same character. It is less surprising than the original and a minute too long, but it is warm, handsome, self-aware tourism advertising that actually shows you the place. Halfdan may not be converted, but plenty of viewers will be. Rating: 4 out of 5.
