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Tuesday, March 3, 2020

Fjord focus: Nordic noir lets the light in at last

Scandinavian TV is moving on from murder. Continuing our look at European culture, we find its new obsessions are go-getting young girls, wartime Royals – and the Swedish origins of Spotify • Poland’s world-beating new film-makers • How Greece’s theatre roared out of a national crisis • Are Berlin’s 56-hour party people facing their last dance? Before 2011, it seemed inconceivable that the British could be gripped in their living rooms by subtitled TV drama, night after fraught night. Surely that was the stuff of arthouse cinema, not edge-of-the-seat primetime viewing. Then along came a trilogy of Scandinavian exports – The Killing, Borgen, The Bridge – and what was once niche entertainment became a nationwide obsession. Soon, a single item of clothing was getting more attention in the British media than most series get in their entire life: Sarah Lund, the detective at the heart of The Killing, was as relentless in her wearing of Faroe Isle jumpers as she was in her pursuit of the murderer at large on the streets of Copenhagen. Scandi noir had arrived in Britain, and the connections it tapped into went much deeper than knitwear. Continue reading...


READ THE ORIGINAL POST AT www.theguardian.com