The movie had been lost for half a century until a 60 minutes copy was found in New York in 1971. Twenty years later, in 1991, a more complete version appeared in the Netherlands, where the movie was restored one year later. The second and most recent restoration was undergone in Norway in 2009, after which the film was released on DVD. The present edition is a little more than 90 minutes long, but there're 20, or even 30 minutes of footage that are still missing.
The movie was produced four years after the publication of the novel (1917) and one year after that it had won Hamsun the Nobel Prize in Literature (1920).