The Tingbjerg Experiment

Louise Detlefsen / Denmark / 2026 / Czech Premiere / 84 min.

synopsis

Copenhagen’s Tingbjerg neighbourhood began as an ambitious social experiment. Urban planner and visionary Steen Eiler Rasmussen sought to realise a dream of bringing different social groups together in a welcoming setting of small apartment blocks surrounded by greenery. By the end of the twentieth century, the experiment had turned into a nightmare marked by outbreaks of ethnic violence, police repression and political demagoguery. In 2018, Copenhagen’s mayor launched a new experiment: moving selected families into new flats within the public housing estate, with the option to buy them at a favourable price. Four years later, the initial idealism has faded, and the young families take stock of what participating in the experiment has given them – and what it has cost them. Can a ghetto of privilege within another ghetto resolve such entrenched problems?

“When you ask me, if Tingbjerg turned out how I envisioned it, I am compelled to answer yes. By and large, it looks like my vision on the surface. – But is there something under the surface that didn’t turn out that way? – Yes, very much so. The residents aren’t thriving as I had imagined.” — Steen Eiler Rasmussen

biography

Louise Detlefsen (1971) is a Danish film director and documentary filmmaker. She graduated from the Danish School of Journalism in 1996. She made her debut with The Cursed Year (2012), and later gained attention with Queen of Hearts (2018), a documentary about Danish trade union leader Lizette Risgaard, and Big Fat Self-Love (2019), a film about accepting one’s own body. The Tingbjerg Experiment is her latest completed film.