One of the most compelling dramas I watched this year was Thomas Vinterberg’s Families Like Ours. The film follows several privileged Danish families forced to become refugees when their country shuts down due to climate catastrophe. Vinterberg described the premise as “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”.
In the story, families are herded onto unsafe boats bound for countries they never imagined living in — places like Romania or Russia. They cannot sell their homes; their savings are frozen. Watching their panic and despair, we begin to understand the agony of fleeing a land you love with no choice and no power.
The film embraces empathy and compassion. Set in a beautiful Copenhagen slowly sinking beneath the sea, Families Like Ours imagines a wealthy European country suddenly vanishing, its citizens scattered to whichever states will accept them.
The irony is hard to ignore. Denmark has some of Europe’s most restrictive asylum and immigration policies. Over the past decade, it has tightened family reunification rules, imposed strict age, income and residency requirements, and openly pursued a political goal of reducing asylum arrivals to near zero.
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