Families Like Ours is not content to be a television drama. it insists on being a mirror. Thomas Vinterberg, that Oscar crowned conjuror of frailty and foolish courage, has taken the easy certainties of modern life and pressed them until they crack.
What if the country you trusted to hold you safe simply vanished under water. what if the flag in your pocket ceased to matter. what if the quiet privileges you never named the right accent, the right skin, the right address were revealed for what they were: temporary strokes of luck.
Vinterberg burst onto the international stage in 1998 with the celebration, his unflinching look at an upper-class Danish family unravelled by revelations of abuse during a patriarch’s 60th birthday. it announced a filmmaker unwilling to look away, unwilling to flatter. that gaze has never softened.
In Vinterberg’s telling, catastrophe is not abstract. it arrives at the dinner table, it floods the nursery, it stains the family photograph. Denmark itself must scatter, and in that scattering the question hangs heavy: who are you when the cushions are stripped away. the series offers no sermon. it observes. it lingers. it asks us to imagine our own passports revoked, our own houses abandoned, our children carrying what cannot be carried.
In New Zealand we are no strangers to his voice. on rialto channel we have lived with his work: the shattering grace of the hunt, the submerged terror of Kursk: the last mission, the intoxicated bravado of another round. Vinterberg’s films have played in our homes, our cinemas, our festivals. we are, unabashedly, admirers.
To call families like ours a drama is too small. it is a parable of chance, a study of the accident of birth, a reminder that security is always a temporary lease. Vinterberg does not shout this. he lets the water rise slowly, frame by frame, until the tide is at your throat. and then he dares you to answer what would you do, when your luck ran out.
Recently, i had the opportunity to ask Thomas Vinterberg ten questions about this haunting new series Families Like Ours, screening exclusively on SKY’s Rialto Channel and the world he continues to shape with his camera. not politely, not with the tired etiquette of a festival junket, but in the only way that felt honest.
Why did you choose the endless corridor of television for this story, instead of the single breath of cinema.
I had this idea about a story that required a wider scope. I felt that sometimes there is an inhibiting factor to the span of a feature length film that prevents me from diving as deep into the characters as I would sometimes like. I also wanted to tell a story about a large family.
When the state collapses, when the family splinters, where did you decide the lens should stay on the child or the country.
I was always determined to focus on the characters and the family. To speak in an intimate setting that mirrors a larger scenario. The looming disaster is essentially a motor that drives the plot but to me at least the real drama is in the impossible choice Laura has to make between her farther, her mother or her boyfriend. I also love that all hope, light and optimism that engulfs the young generations.
you are a creature of film. did the sprawl of episodes feel like freedom or like chains.
Initially, freedom at least the idea of them when you think of the series as a whole. However, the episodes are tiny cells with individual needs and desires that have to evenly balanced among each other.
Normally, you shoot a film, and you wrap, come home and carry on but as we progressed with this shoot, it eventually felt like chasing the horizon. I took its toll on me and craved more than yoga to mend.
Laura, your young wanderer, must choose between blood and love. is she Denmark’s shadow, or yours.
To me, Laura is the embodiment of a choice we all have to make at one time or another.
In another round men searched for courage in the bottle. here, families search for courage in exile. aren’t they the same tale in different clothing.
I think the characters needs are very different. Families like Ours is a story about resilience and love.
What face convinced you it could carry a drowning nation. what trembling gave you your lead.
There was a very long casting process involved also in finding the right constellation within the group of friends, but once I came across Amaryllis, I knew I had Laura.
Denmark has been your constant costar. taverns, classrooms, rising seas. do you still call it home, or only a backdrop.
I live in Denmark together with my family. It continues to be one of my sources of inspiration – past and present. Perhaps because I know my country well enough now for it to reward me with the kind of detail that brings my writing to life.
Your work dissects human closeness until only bone remains. did television give you sharper tools for the cutting.
There’s pros and cons to everything. There is more time but there are also a lot of characters.
The Oscar sits behind you. did the applause change your appetite or only sharpen your hunger.
I always wanted to reach a large audience, and I love to see my work travel. I think art has an innate ability to reach out and communicate across borders that moves me.
And when this flood is done, will you stay in television’s labyrinth or return to cinema’s single beam of light.
I am filmmaker and I continue to be a filmmaker, but I also enjoy writing, making tv series and theatre plays. It all comes down to the story and the project.
Vinterberg’s answers flow like the tide that haunts his series measured, deliberate, each pulling something buried to the surface. there is no ego in his voice, only a quiet curiosity about why humans cling to one another when the world begins to shift. families like ours is not a warning; it’s a reflection. he asks what happens when luck runs out, yet what he really shows us is what remains: love, loyalty, and the thin, stubborn thread of hope.
before we part, i ask the question that has nothing to do with cinema. New Zealand have you been? he shakes his head, smiles. not yet.
we would love to host you.
— Roger Wyllie, View Mag
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