2024-09-09 02:02:32
Danish director Thomas Vinterberg has set his first TV series in the bleak near future. It takes place at a time when rising sea levels have already completely flooded the Netherlands and now Denmark is facing the same fate. In an effort to save the nation, the government orders a mass evacuation of all residents and a state shutdown.
The miniseries Families Like Ours will start airing on Danish television in October. Photo: Sturla Brandth | Video: Studiocanal
Six million Danes are trying to process the papers for migration to other European countries as quickly as possible. Those who fail are deported by the authorities to prearranged destinations such as Romania.
The director partially filmed the miniseries called Families Like Ours in the Czech Republic. He presented it at the Venice Film Festival this week. “Basically, it’s about people and asks how we would cope with such a crisis,” says Thomas Vinterberg. “How exactly would it go? Would we survive? Would we be able to start over in a foreign country?” he asks.
The award-winning 55-year-old filmmaker won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film for Booze four years ago. But he got the idea for the new product years ago, when he observed how unkindly Europe behaved towards refugees before the Syrian civil war.
A few years later, the director was alone in Paris, where he had already lived for a year and a half, but he still felt unwelcome there. “Every day I went to the same cafe and they always treated me as rudely as a tourist. I suddenly felt a terrible desire to be at home with my family again. I missed my daughters. So I began to imagine what it would be like if they split us up as refugees, if the roles were reversed and suddenly it was us from the West who had to flee,” he explains to The Hollywood Reporter website.
Under the series, Vinterberg is also signed as one of the screenwriters. “Perhaps at the beginning of all this there was a fear that we are like those passengers in the first class on the Titanic, the water is already flooding the living quarters of the third and fourth class, but we continue to dine, play the violin and do not want to hear anything. We do not want to change, we are unable to to change,” criticizes the director.
Amaryllis August plays high school student Laura. | Photo: Per Arnesen
In the series, he wanted not only to show the dangers facing the coastal Scandinavian country, but also to highlight its organizational skills.
Vinterberg is convinced that the Danes would not wait for the water to flood them, but would prepare in advance and proceed systematically.
That is why he did not emphasize close-up shots of cities disappearing as a result of floods and inundations. Instead, the story is set a few months before the ecological disaster and shows the toll it would take on people.
The series follows several characters. The architect and his wife hope to be able to transfer their lives to Paris. The other pair knows the government’s plans ahead of time because one of the partners works for the ministry. The story also features a talented boy who wants to get a football scholarship to Great Britain, or an architect’s ex-wife, whom the authorities order to relocate to Romania.
However, the main character is her daughter, a high school student in love for the first time. She has to choose between those closest to her, i.e. whether she will head to Bucharest with her mother and her new boyfriend, or whether she will go to Paris with her father, reports Deadline.com.
According to him, the series in some way resembles the film Melancholia by the Danish director Lars von Trier, in which another planet crashed into the Earth.
But unlike him, Vinterberg did not strive for spectacular scenery. “The greater horror is always what you can’t see,” claims the filmmaker, who consulted on the topic not only with climate experts.
He also teamed up with the Danish Foreign Ministry to figure out how to depict the mass evacuation of residents as faithfully as possible. “They talked about creating corridors in Europe for the movement of refugees and transport,” he mentions.
Families Like Ours is one of four TV series that premiered at the Venice Film Festival this week.
For Czech viewers, the seven-part miniseries may also be interesting because last February and March the crew also filmed in Hradec Králové, Hýskov, Bílina, Kladno, Modletice or Prague and its surroundings. Through incentives, the Czech Republic paid creators more than 15 million crowns. Danish television will start broadcasting the news in October, The Hollywood Reporter website wrote.
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