The many faces of cinematic Copenhagen

This article is part of FT Globetrotter’s guide to Copenhagen

As FT readers will already know, Copenhagen offers a walking tour dedicated to the locations of Borgen. It isn’t the only popular TV series that visitors can relive. Fans of The Killing and The Bridge can also take a tailored stroll through the streets that made the city the capital of Nordic noir.

But Copenhagen has a rich history in movies too — one more than worth the foot leather. The grand production company Nordisk Film dates back to 1906: one of the oldest continuously operating film studios in the world. The city was the birthplace of fabled silent film star Asta Neilsen and the great director Carl Theodor Dreyer. Later, Copenhagen caught Hollywood’s eye: Alfred Hitchcock was an admirer (see below). And then later would come Lars von Trier, Thomas Vinterberg and more — a new wave of young Danish writers and directors who made the wonderful, wonderful place hymned in Hans Christian Andersen a byword for the new and shocking. Here, then, is our collection of the most essential big-screen Copenhagen.

‘Another Round’ (Thomas Vinterberg, 2020)

Back in 1995, director Thomas Vinterberg was a founder of the Dogme movement — a group of Copenhagen filmmakers whose mischievous embrace of low-tech cinema brought global attention. Vinterberg’s breakthrough, Festen, caused a sensation: a shocking tale of family secrets staged in a country house. But a quarter century of career ups-and-downs would pass before he made his most successful portrait of the Danish capital: Another Round, the pickled story of a middle-aged school teacher (played by Mads Mikkelsen) and a group of friends testing a scientific theory about the life-enhancing properties of alcohol. 

The film mostly unfolds in the comfortable northern suburb of Gentofte, with scenes of hedonism on an S-train into the city. But it also features probably the most memorable vision of modern Copenhagen on screen: Mikkelsen’s giddy cavort around the waterfront cobbles of Nordre Toldbod, in Copenhagen harbour. For Vinterberg, the homecoming would bring dazzling results: an Oscar for Best International Feature Film.

Where to watch: Channel 4, BFI Player, Amazon Prime and Apple TV

‘Torn Curtain’ and ‘Topaz’ (Alfred Hitchcock, 1966 and 1969) 

For all his London roots, Alfred Hitchcock was clearly fond of Copenhagen. Twice over, he gave the city a starring role. First came Torn Curtain, with Paul Newman and Julie Andrews as an imperilled engaged couple, cast alongside a picture-postcard version of the city, heavy on the Tivoli Gardens. The director’s signature cameo, meanwhile, came in the lobby of the landmark Hotel d’Angleterre, bouncing a baby on his knee.

But better yet would be the opening of Topaz, the spy thriller Hitchcock made three years later. Mapping the defection of a Soviet intelligent officer, fleeing on foot across the city into the arms of American agents, the scene is a thing of cinematic beauty, a silent movie in miniature. The trail begins at the actual Soviet embassy on Kristianiagade, then tracks though landmarks including City Hall Square and the Royal Copenhagen porcelain factory. A key role was taken, too, by the fabled Den Permanente store, then a hub of 1960s Danish craft and design. A poster for the store also featured in Torn Curtain. Was the master of suspense a fan of mid-century modern Danish homeware?

Where to watch “Torn Curtain”: Google Play, Apple TV and Amazon Prime
Where to watch “Topaz”: Google Play, Apple TV and Amazon Prime

‘Nightwatch’ (Ole Bornedal, 1994)

In the 1990s Britain had Trainspotting; France had the crackling urban drama La Haine. But Denmark had a game-changing hit before either in Nightwatch, the darkly comic 1994 thriller that brought Danish movies into the global spotlight and packed out cinemas in Denmark itself. A grisly tale of morgues and murder, the film was very much a product of the capital, shot in locations including the Natural History Museum and the University of Copenhagen’s department of computer science. 

For a cast of then-unknown stars, Nightwatch would turn out to be quite the springboard. Kim Bodnia went on to play deadpan cop Martin Rohde in The Bridge; Sofie Gråbøl became the driven Sarah Lund in The Killing; and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau left Denmark to play the troubled Jaime Lannister in Game of Thrones. And director Ole Bornedal did what the makers of European hits did so often in the 1990s — he remade his movie for Hollywood in 1997, to much less successful effect.

Where to watch: DVD

‘Hans Christian Andersen’ (Charles Vidor, 1952) and ‘A Royal Affair’ (Nikolaj Arcel, 2012)

Film is the art of illusion, and not every famous Copenhagen movie was actually shot anywhere near the city. Complete with its deathless showstopper “Wonderful, Wonderful Copenhagen”, biopic Hans Christian Andersen was wholly filmed on Hollywood soundstages. It also nearly provoked a diplomatic crisis. Ahead of release, the Danish Foreign Office readied a formal protest over what it suspected would be a travesty of the writer’s life. Complaints were shelved, however, when the film duly inspired a huge uptick in tourism to Denmark. (And star Danny Kaye would make several visits to the city.)

Sixty years later, A Royal Affair proved less controversial — but would be another case of a cinematic Copenhagen that wasn’t quite what it appeared. The film told the story of the 18th-century passion between Johan Friedrich Struensee (Mads Mikkelsen), doctor to the mentally ill King Christian VII, and the king’s wife, Princess Caroline Matilda (Alicia Vikander). The movie’s popularity cranked up interest in the central locations, not least Christiansborg Palace. And yet — spoiler warning — the entire film had, in fact, been shot in the Czech Republic.

Where to watch “Hans Christian Andersen”: Amazon Prime
Where to watch “A Royal Affair”: Apple TV, Amazon Prime

‘Pusher’ (Nicolas Winding Refn, 1996)

Unlike Hans Christian Andersen with its colourful sets, down-and-dirty crime thriller Pusher was pointedly shot in the real Copenhagen — a picture of the city in the raw. Directed by another young Danish upstart, Nicolas Winding Refn, the movie took the spirit of early Martin Scorsese and applied it to the tale of a luckless drug dealer and his idiot sidekick, as played by The Bridge’s Kim Bodnia and Mads Mikkelsen. (Yes, him again.)

With a cast reputedly joined by members of the Copenhagen underworld, the movie was shot “guerrilla style” in the scuffed streets and bars of Vesterbro, then still the city’s red-light district and centre of the drug trade. Times change, of course. In the years to come, Vesterbro would be gentrified, while Bodnia, Mikkelsen and Refn would go on to stellar careers. By 2011, the director was in LA, shooting Drive with Ryan Gosling — though not before making a pair of sequels to the original Pusher, both just as grimy, and just as brilliant.

Where to watch: Amazon Prime, BFI Player

‘Smilla’s Feeling for Snow’ (Bille August, 1997)

Long before anyone spoke of Nordic noir, Copenhagen novelist Peter Høeg enjoyed a global bestseller with Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow. The story of a scientist pursuing the truth behind the death of a Greenlandic Inuit boy in a Christianshavn housing block, it was an epic crime drama with notes of both the mystical and political. 

The film adaptation would be directed by a giant of Danish cinema, Bille August, who was also responsible for the classic Pelle the Conqueror. A mostly British cast was led by Julia Ormond as Smilla, in a film that visually name-dropped the Hotel d’Angleterre, the Copenhagen landmark where Alfred Hitchcock appeared with a baby in Torn Curtain (see above).

Where to watch: DVD

‘The Kingdom’ (Lars von Trier, 1994, 1997 and 2022)

We have made a point through this guide to Copenhagen movies to keep at arm’s length the many fine TV shows set in the city. But to end, the rules will be bent just a little for Lars von Trier’s grandly absurdist mini-series The Kingdom. Like David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, it saw a big-name film director create surreal mayhem on the small screen. (Like Twin Peaks, too, a second series was followed by a much-later third instalment, in The Kingdom’s case in 2022.) 

Von Trier is a graduate of the Danish National Film School, on Copenhagen harbour. And yet none of his famously provocative movies has had quite the obvious link to the capital as this, the episodic story of life in Denmark’s largest public hospital, Rigshospitalet. (In Denmark, the title was Riget, its local colloquial name.) With ghostly apparitions and the presence of Satan himself spliced with comic medical soap opera, The Kingdom never failed to surprise. But perhaps the biggest shock was that von Trier had somehow got permission to shoot in the real “Riget” — one grand Danish institution doing a good turn for another.

Where to watch: Amazon Prime and Mubi

What’s your favourite film set in Copenhagen? Tell us in the comments below. And follow FT Globetrotter on Instagram at @FTGlobetrotter

Cities with the FT

FT Globetrotter, our insider guides to some of the world’s greatest cities, offers expert advice on eating and drinking, exercise, art and culture — and much more

Find us in Copenhagen, London, Hong Kong, Tokyo, New York, Paris, Rome, Frankfurt, Singapore, Miami, Toronto, Madrid, Melbourne, Zurich, Milan and Vancouver