As film-maker Mads Brügger explains at the outset of this four-part documentary series, a black swan is the name given to an event so extraordinary that you could never have seen it coming. In this case, Brügger’s black swan isn’t an event so much as a person: a lawyer named Amira Smajic, a “once in a lifetime” source for a journalist and the person who – he says – could “force us to rethink Danish society”. Smajic has spent years acting on behalf of some of the country’s most infamous criminal gangs, and is now exposing their activities as part of this major investigation for the state-owned broadcaster TV 2. Crucially, it’s not just the criminal underworld that Smajic is laying bare, but also their white-collar accomplices – the seemingly respectable businesspeople and lawyers unfazed by escapades involving dirty money and fraudulent invoices. It’s a co-dependent arrangement – one section of society “is feeding the other, and vice versa”, says Smajic.
It would be an understatement to say that The Black Swan made an impact on Danish viewers. Half of all Danes watched it when it aired in 2024, and it sparked a string of police investigations, as well as a tightening of laws around money laundering and gang activity. It has also turned the country’s almost prelapsarian vision of itself on its head. Brügger – a steely, often sandpaper-dry compere who has previously gone undercover in North Korea for the film The Red Chapel – claims making The Black Swan has shown him that the country could be “grim and dark”. Simply put: something was rotten in the state of Denmark.
