A Look into the Future: Climate Refugee Drama Splits Opinion

Featuring scenes of huge crowds boarding ferries, protest and desperation as 6 million Danes become climate refugees and life as they know it collapses, the new TV series by the Oscar-winning director Thomas Vinterberg is a potential "look into the future", he says.

- Miranda Bryant

Featuring scenes of huge crowds boarding ferries, protest and desperation as 6 million Danes become climate refugees and life as they know it 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 that 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 – "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 opinion. Some have praised it for bringing the climate crisis to life by depicting white privileged Danes as climate refugees.