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 the climate crisis.
“Luckily, Families Like Ours is a work of fiction,” she said. “In reality, we can still act to stop the consequences of the climate crisis before it’s too late.”
Jakob Dreyer, a climate and security expert at the University of Copenhagen, said he was “blown away” by the first two or three episodes of the seven-part series. While he said it was unlikely the whole of Denmark would be evacuated in one go, the premise of the show was not “far-fetched”.
He said: “People appreciate that it’s fiction, it’s a drama. Of course it’s not realistic that a whole country would be evacuated at once. What is at risk of happening in Denmark is primarily storm floods that make parts of the country more uninhabitable.” But, he added: “Some countries are at extreme risk from climate change. The idea isn’t far-fetched. Some countries and groups have to deal with it already.”
In his research he has found that Danes are significantly more willing to support Ukrainian refugees than climate refugees. In this context, putting the most privileged at the centre of the drama – where middle class Danes became refugees – worked effectively. It did, however, mean that the impact on the most vulnerable groups, who in reality would suffer most, was not in the spotlight, he added.
Charlotte Slente, the secretary-general of the Danish Refugee Council, said the show would be educational for viewers and encourage empathy by helping people who have not experienced being a refugee to “better identify with the challenges and choices people are forced to make”.
“It also shows the chaos of all of it – how difficult it is to make well-informed decisions,” she added. “Everybody becomes dependent on the mercy of others.”
Mette Nelund, the head of drama at TV2 Denmark, said: “Families Like Ours is among our most watched drama series, but just as importantly the series has helped to create important conversations among the Danes – both the big, broad conversations and the close ones.”
She added: “We are very proud and happy that the Danes have welcomed the series and all the reflections it brings.”
