By Hanna Rantala
VENICE (Reuters) – In his debut television series, director Thomas Vinterberg imagines his home country Denmark shutting down due to rising sea waters, with the entire population forced to flee.
“Families Like Ours,” which premiered at the Venice Film Festival, is set in the near future. The Netherlands has already vanished beneath the waves and Danish leaders are determined to save the lives of their own people, ordering a mass evacuation.
Families are split and friends become separated as some six million Danes scramble to obtain documents to relocate to affluent European countries or are shipped off to government-funded destinations in countries such as Romania.
“This show is primarily about human beings, an exploration of how we cope with crisis,” said Vinterberg. “What would happen? Are we resilient? Can we reinvent ourselves in other countries?” Vinterberg told Reuters.
The idea for the show came to Vinterberg, who won the Oscar for best foreign feature for his 2020 film “Another Round”, as he sat alone in a Paris hotel seven years ago, far from his family.
“Maybe it was driven by this fear … this feeling of being on the Titanic, in first class, and the water is coming in the third and fourth class, and we just keep eating and keep playing violin and we don’t want to hear it,” said Vinterberg, who co-wrote the screenplay.
“We don’t want to change, we’re unable to change,” he said.
To highlight the impending danger and the organisational skills of the Scandinavian country, famed for the “hygge” lifestyle of cosy togetherness, Vinterberg chose not to go big on scenes of submerged streets and homes.
Instead, he focused on the months leading up to the climate disaster and their toll on people.
“What you don’t see is more scary than what you see,” he said, adding that his team consulted climate scientists and reached out to the Danish ministry of foreign affairs for advice on how to convincingly portray the mass evacuation.
“They were talking about corridors through Europe, like streams of refugees and transport and stuff like that,” he said.
“What we tried to do is imagine as realistically as possible what would happen in our country, and that’s why it became this catastrophe in slow motion,” he said, convinced Danes would start to move out well before the water swept in.
“Families Like Ours” is one of four TV series shown in their entirety at Venice, underlining the growing importance of television within the film industry.
(Writing by Hanna Rantala; Editing by Crispian Balmer, William Maclean)
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