“Families like ours”, the first shock series by Thomas Vinterberg

In “Families Like Ours”, Oscar-winning director Thomas Vinterberg imagines his country threatened by water and the entire population forced to leave. A dark parable about the state of the world and the clinical study of the different members of a family. The series is broadcast on Canal+.

Rising water levels are inevitable. Denmark must be evacuated. Millions of inhabitants must emigrate and become refugees. This is the shocking starting point of this series Families like ours (“Families like ours”) broadcast on Canal+. We follow 8 members of a family: an established architect and his wife, his daughter and her boyfriend, his wife’s brother, a ministry official who takes the opportunity to sell his house before anyone else. Everyone has to start from scratch and everyone adapts in their own way.

This is the first series from Thomas Vinterberg, the Oscar-winning director of Drunk. She talks about chaos, loss of jobs, loss of possessions, and borders closing in Europe. This disturbing melodrama resonates with current events even though the director imagined it 7 years ago, before Covid and before the war in Ukraine. Thomas Vinterberg explains: “In my fiction, I like to shake up the order, talk about what is disturbing, and celebrate solidarity in a certain way. What interests me is always the relationships between an individual and a group. And that’s is always more dramatic and more interesting when the group reacts chaotically.”

Realism, and this is what is striking in the series, was a strong desire of the director: “We have done a lot of research on States. How does a State react to refugees? How do we obtain citizenship in France, or elsewhere? How States treat refugees, how they make them travel, etc.”

This rhythmic series starts from a basic premise: the flooding of Denmark, an idea initially purely invented by the director: “At the time, we talked to a lot of experts, and they all told us that this could never happen. That was seven years ago. I don’t know what they would say today. .”

Families like oursa dark, embarrassing, fascinating fable, like a clinical analysis of Humanity. 7 episodes to watch (with your guts) on Canal+.