Industry Insights

After he made the acclaimed 2018 film Woman at War (Kona fer i strið), Icelandic writer/director Benedikt Erlingssonknew he wasn’t done with stories of headstrong women breaking the rules with good intentions in mind.

“I thought I was finished with this concept of the cure justifies the means. But this ‘Danish woman’ idea came to me, and it was in a way the black side of that film. I knew I couldn’t do another film with the same concept, so I thought a TV series would be a great way to investigate this concept further. Sometimes I just think of them as the white witch (in Woman at War) and the black witch (in The Danish Woman)”.

“The concept is that we want to save the world, and we have all these impulses that are sometimes brutal and bad impulses - and I must admit that there is a lot of [this] inside of me,” the writer/director says in the latest episode of the Nordic Film Talks podcast series.

That idea has come to life in Erlingsson’s first TV series, The Danish Woman (Danska konan), which has its world premiere in the International Panorama section of Series Mania in Lille, France (March 21-28). Trine Dyrholm plays a former agent in the Danish Secret Service who decides to start a new life in Reykjavik, but in her righteous quests to help her new neighbours, she falls back on some of her old ways of working, including the use of brute force.

Erlingsson sees this character, Ditte Jensen, as a representative of the Machiavellian parts of human nature that come to light in authoritarian regimes. “You have a reptile brain and you want to attack the problem, and you think the best way is to sabotage this or that. We have this inside of us, and this is of course the tool of the empire, and this is the tool of states in power. A lot of ideologues have used this tool, the brutal tool of war or threat. So the idea of The Danish Woman is you have a persona like this. She’s a mixture of Pippi Longstocking and maybe a little bit of Putin and a little bit of Rambo.”

It was going to take a special actress to bring Ditte to life, and Erlingsson always had Dyrholm in mind. “Trine keeps Ditte sympathetic all the way, that’s a dangerous magic that good actors have. She has shown us so many faces, she’s a chameleon, and that’s what I needed. Ditte is always acting, and she also has many masks. She can be a dragon, and she can also be a sympathetic person.” (Listen to Trine Dyrholm’s Nordic Film Talks episode here.)

Series Mania premieres the first two episodes of the show, with the broadcast rollout of the 6x47’ episodes starting in January 2026. The Party Film Sales handles international sales. Marianne Slot and Carine Leblanc produce for France’s Slot Machine (they also produced Woman at War), with the series also made in coproduction with Iceland’s Gullslottid and Zik Zak Filmworks in association with RÚV, ZDF/ARTE, DR, Yle, Truenorth, Wild Bunch Germany, Jon Palmason, Sigurdur G. Palmason with support of KMI -The Icelandic Film Centre, Nordisk Film & TV Fond, and co-funded by The European Union.

Erlingsson wrote the show with Ólafur Egill Egilsson (who also co-wrote Woman at War), and their scripts manage to brilliantly juggle tragicomedy, absurdity, action, empathy as well as moral questions. “The attitude is to not tell the audience that this is a comedy or tell them this is dramatic. It is to take every situation as it is. For me, it is beautiful that it has many dimensions.” In writing his first episodic series, he found “it was chaotic fun to just row a boat into the fog with my back to where I was heading”.

He continues: “We really wanted to surprise the audience, we wanted it not to be calculated. I wanted to pull the carpet from underneath the audience.”

He’s ready to get back to a simpler arthouse feature film next, he says, finding it exhausting working on a TV show for many years, including 54 shooting days. “This is too long, that’s like shooting three films in a row,” he says. “We were also shooting with two cameras, and that was also totally new for me.”

He’s been writing several new projects. One of them is The Normal Man, from the male perspective. He jokes that after three films about women, he’s “earned the right to tell the story of men in crisis.”

In the full podcast episode, Erlingsson also talks about how he ignored the famous dramaturgical advice to “save the cat” in the opening of The Danish Woman; why the title sequence introduces different dance moves to each episode; and why he thinks Iceland is such a hotbed of creativity.

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