Danes invest to build a great film and TV drama industry

Sustained state investment key to developing successful industry

There are some countries in Europe which have natural advantages in terms of film and television. Denmark is not one of them.

A country of just 5.6 million people with a language which one of its most famous actress, Sidse Batett Knudsen, the star of Borgen, likened to somebody speaking with a potato in their mouth, Denmark should not enjoy the pre-eminence in does in cinema and television.

Yet, it has built a dizzying reputation for its output which is the envy of the rest of Europe. Last year Danish directors won 86 prizes at international festivals. A Royal Affair is up for an Oscar for best foreign language film this year.

In 2011, Susanne Bier won the Oscar for best foreign language film for In a Better World, Nicholas Winding Refn won best director at Cannes and Danes won best film, best director and best European achievement in world cinema at the European Film Festival. Little wonder the British director Stephen Frears has taken to calling them, in jest, the “bloody Danes”.

And international audiences cannot get enough of Danish television drama. The crime series the Killing and Borgen, the story of Denmark’s fictitious female prime minister, both highly literate yet dramatically engaging productions, are shown in 60 countries and have racked up audiences of a million plus on the minority channel BBC4.

None of this has happened by accident.

Integrated strategy

Denmark has an integrated national audiovisual strategy and state support other countries envy. In 1997, the government passed the Film Act which set about producing an integrated approach to film-making.

“The decision was taken that film would be the most important cultural medium and that is really important and that view has unanimous support in parliament,” said Steffen Andersen-Møller of the Danish Film Institute. “The best way to market any small country is through film, not telling people how great your country is.”

Its Den Danske Filmskole (National Film School of Denmark) is world-renowned and has produced a conveyor belt of cinematic talent – most famously Lars von Trier, who developed cinema production known as Dogme 95.

The Danish government provided €62 million in direct support to the film institute last year. The equivalent figure for the Irish Film Board is €11.5 million though tax incentives also play an important role here.

Danish audiences have responded to this investment. Last year, 29 per cent of cinema tickets sold in Denmark were for Danish films, a percentage other small countries could only dream about. Five Danish films were in the top 10 box office last year.

This has allowed talent to flourish. A case in point is young director Tobias Lindholm whose film the Kidnapping was one of three Danish films shown at the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival (JDIFF) this week.

The budget for the film was just over €2 million, a modest amount considering that much of it was shot on a ship off Kenya. Between support from the film institute and state broadcaster DR, 85 per cent of the budget was from state funding.

The boyish looking Lindholm (35) only graduated from film school in 2007 but has had an extraordinary career to date. In between films, he wrote or storyboarded 20 episodes of Borgen.

Series like the Killing and Borgen have big budgets – about €500,000 an episode – but they come with a weight of expectation. “Unless we get 20 per cent of the audience, the show gets cancelled,” he said.

Lindholm believes the Danes have turned the disadvantage of having a minority language into an advantage.

“We will continue to have films in our own language. That’s the big difference between Denmark and Ireland. You don’t have that extra spice for your own films,” he said.

On average the film institute and DR finance between 55 per cent and 60 per cent of Danish feature films. For documentaries, the average is closer to 80 per cent. The instigator of much of Denmark’s TV drama is DR. Unlike RTÉ, it is funded entirely by licence fee and has no advertising revenue.

Yet the licence fee is nearly twice what it is in Ireland at €303.35 and DR has an annual budget of 3.5 billion Danish krone (€455 million). DR’s head of fiction Nadia Kløvedal-Reich said it has been successful by sticking to tried and trusted people who can deliver.

Danish drama has travelled abroad, she said, because “the power is in the story” and their writers have concentrated on telling stories to a Danish audience that have universal appeal. While not everybody might be interested in Danish coalition politics, she says, most people can relate to the story of a woman whose personal life is suffering in pursuit of power (Borgen). Though the Killing and Borgen have been major successes abroad, international sales account for just 5 per cent of the production budgets of both shows, she says. “There is a lot of hype about it just because they were on BBC4, but we do not get paid a lot of money for them.”

Irish interest

The success of the Danish film and television industry has not been lost on its equivalent in Ireland given the similar size of the markets involved.

James Morris, the former chairman of the Irish Film Board, said Danish companies such as Zentropa have been world-class operators in not only financing and making films, but also in distribution and marketing abroad.

Teresa McGrane, the deputy chief executive of the Irish Film Board, said the Danish film industry is an old industry while ours is relatively new.

She said the Danes had some natural advantages because their public want to see Danish films, they are part of a four country Scandinavian market and they have a supportive television market.