The Black Swan is the second most-watched program on Danish TV2. Almost 2.5 million Danes (out of a population of 6 million) have watched the documentary series. Read on to learn more about Nordic noir and The Black Swan.
“If you walk down the wrong road, you will get a shot in the neck,” says narcotics dealer “Wassem”. The hooded man is obviously not kidding. He’s threatening Amira Smajic, a lawyer with many years of experience in money laundering. Still, he has no idea how far Amira Smajic already has gone down what he deems “the wrong road”.
The Black Swan follows a repentant master criminal as she sets up corrupt clients before hidden cameras. But is she really reformed – and is the director up to his own tricks?
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Related: Nordic Noir – Crime Scene Iceland
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Suppose the Panama Papers have become a byword for exposure of corruption and financial fraud around the world. In that case, The Black Swan (“Den Sorte Swane”) by Denmark’s own truth-seeking and Sundance winner Mads Brügger is poised to have a similar long-lasting effect on the Scandinavian country. The Black Swan clearly documents shady connections between the underworld and the upper class. But is it necessary to challenge traditional journalistic values to reach larger audiences?
The four-part documentary has also won the prestigious national Robert Award for best TV series, beating strong contenders such as Thomas Vinterberg’s “Families Like Ours.”
The trap of The Black Swan was laid in a rented office: two rooms in downtown Copenhagen, furnished without a whisper of Scandi style. The premises might have felt as impersonal and stark as a confessional if it wasn’t for a Frida Kahlo print on one wall. That, in any event, was what it became.
For six months, beginning in mid-2022, a parade of people – members of motorcycle gangs, entrepreneurs, lawyers, real-estate barons, politicians – trooped through to recount their sins to Amira Smajic. They didn’t come for expiation. They knew Smajic to be one of them – an outlaw, and in her particular case, a business lawyer so skilled at laundering money that she’d enabled a couple of billion kroner in financial crime over the previous decade.
Cleverly summarized by DR Sales with the Shakespearian logline “something is rotten in the state of Denmark.” the show is pinned by Kim Christiansen, the shingle’s executive producer, in charge of documentaries and co-productions, as “kind of ‘The Sopranos’ in real life, where the underworld meets the upperworld, plotting their next big target. It’s an unprecedented unreal portrait of brutal reality,” he said.
As director Mads Brügger says at the end of episode 1: “Scientists use the expression ‘black swan’ for occurrences that could suddenly change how we see the world. If Amira Smajic goes all the way, she might end up as a black swan, a messenger that will force us to rethink Danish society.” That may already be the case. The Danish Minister of Justice was “furious, outraged and shocked” after watching The Black Swan. The Danish Federation of Lawyers apologized for the actions of two esteemed lawyers in the series. All over the nation, people have been discussing The Black Swan since its premiere in late May last year.
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Related: What is Nordic Noir?
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Amira Smajic was called the Ice Queen because she showed no flicker of regret for what she did. She was the one who contacted the high-profile journalist and filmmaker Mads Brügger, known for his thought-provoking performative investigative works, often infiltrating various environments, as he did in Sundance winners “The Red Chapel,” “Cold Case Hammarskjöld,” and the series “The Mole.”
Amira met Brügger in the late summer of 2022 in a sushi bar on the outskirts of Copenhagen. Not long into their conversation, he understood he was in the presence of a truly unique person, someone with insight into the criminal underworld, but also the upper class of Danish society, important businessmen, lawyers, etc. As a source, that made her enormously interesting. What was also remarkable about her was that from the get-go, she was willing to divulge her own identity, face, voice, and name. She said, ‘I want to come clean.’
While the people on the street were talking about the cynicism and disrespect for society on the part of the criminals, journalists debated the ethics of Brügger. Hidden cameras are always controversial, especially when the lawbreakers they record are easily recognizable and their names clearly mentioned, but the journalists were mostly concerned with Amira Smajic.
Norwegian civil servants invited Brügger to Oslo in January to discuss money laundering. He believes that all of Scandinavia has persuaded itself that crime exists only in violent, poor abscesses on the edges of its societies.
When asked if it’s necessary for modern documentaries to go beyond traditional journalism – even ethics – to reach a large audience, Mads Brügger says: “A lot of journalism today suffers from being void of experience. We have some very fixed conventions and assumptions telling us what is and is not possible. It has been interesting to observe some critics’ reaction to The Black Swan, like ‘we all knew there were connections between the underworld and the upper class’.
The 51-year-old director has often appeared as fictional characters in his own films, most notably in The Ambassador (Ambassadøren, 2011), in which he dressed up as an old-fashioned colonial diplomat wishing to buy diamonds in the Central African Republic. His documentaries have found their own balance between political satire, anthropological examination, and spy films. The Black Swan has a bleaker tone than his previous documentaries, but it is, essentially, a documentary disguised as a spy thriller.
Other Scandinavian nations also reeled upon watching The Black Swan. After the series premiered in Sweden, a criminologist at Lund University warned: “There’s a lot of evidence that it’s probably even worse here.” “The Danes totally subscribe to this idea that Denmark has no corruption, and to the idea of Denmark as the end of the road,” Brügger said, referring to the political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s notion that “getting to Denmark” is the goal of every modern democracy. “The Black Swan punctuated that hallucination,” Brügger said.
The Black Swan is not the only Nordic documentary to start a debate. In Sweden, the program Kalla Fakta on TV4 documented that the right-wing party The Sweden Democrats had created a troll factory to spread false information and attack political opponents. Like in The Black Swan, the approach in Kalla Fakta: Undercover i trollfabriken confronted ethics, as a journalist never revealed that he was a press member when he infiltrated the Sweden Democrats and used hidden cameras.
Nordic Noir – The Black Swan, reported by Tor Kjolberg
Feature image (top): (c) DR Sales