Featuring scenes of huge crowds boarding ferries, protest and desperation as six million Danes become climate refugees and life as they know it rapidly collapses, the new TV series by the Oscar-winning director Thomas Vinterberg is a potential “look into the future”, he says.Familier som vores (Families Like Ours) – a drama which depicts a flooded Denmark shut down and evacuated – has been viewed nearly 1m times and become a national talking point. At its premiere at the Venice international film festival, it evoked tears, shouts and a standing ovation, with one critic describing it as “grimly prophetic”.Vinterberg, who co-founded the Dogme 95 film movement and whose film Druk (Another Round) won the Academy Award for best international feature in 2020, wrote in his director’s statement that the drama – part of the cli-fi, or climate fiction, genre that sets stories in the impacts of the climate crisis and global heating – “imagines a situation where we, as citizens of a civilised and wealthy part of the world, are forced to leave our country, our friends, relatives, and everything we hold dear”.But among climate scientists and experts, the show has divided opinions. Some have praised it for bringing the climate crisis to life by depicting white privileged Danes as climate refugees. Others have criticised the show for depicting a scenario that they claim could not scientifically happen and for focusing on the personal drama and ignoring some of the structural inequalities within Danish society, which is known for its harsh asylum seeker policies and hardline attitudes to immigrant integration.Kirsten Halsnæs, a professor of climate and economics at Danmarks Tekniske Universitet (DTU) who has played a key role in the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) since 1993, said: “We all know that this couldn’t happen. The sea level rise would have to be so high that it could never happen for three or four centuries. So it is not so much a climate change story, it is rather about what could happen if Danish people became refugees.”But Lauren Bowey, a campaigner for Greenpeace Denmark, disagrees. “The tempo is perhaps dramatised, but the threat is definitely real,” she said. “We all want to feel safe in our homes but in Denmark we are threatened by water from every direction – from the groundwater, from the over 8,500km of coastline and from the increasing rainfall.”A huge storm surge in October 2023 that resulted in more than 3,300 damage claims and costing more than 1bn DKK (£111m) in compensation demonstrates how much destruction flooding is already causing in Denmark, she said.The Danish Meteorological Institute has estimated that such weather events, which statistically occur every 100 years, could become third yearly events by the end of the century at an annual cost of 43bn DKK (£4.77bn) in flood damages. Globally, more than 20 million people were displaced from their homes last year due to
Gio. Gen 9th, 2025
