Ulaa Salim's Sons of Denmark is showing January 24 –February 22, 2020 on MUBI as part of the series Direct from Rotterdam.
What causes a man to become extreme? That was one of the main questions I asked my self with this film. I saw a world that was on the edge of a major change. Everybody was closing in on each other and from the unknown. I wanted to tell a story about the next, perhaps inevitable, step in our society. What happens when normalization of extreme voices take place and these voices gain power and authority? What happens when the hard rhetoric is no longer just words, but is put into action?
I started writing the script for Sons of Denmark six years before actually getting the opportunity to shoot it. I was still in film school and had the urge to speak up about the extreme voices and the pattern I was seeing and feeling. I wanted to create a film about our time, about growing up in a world where fear and hate was normal from the top down in society. I was also inspired by great films that encapsulated a certain time and era, films like Taxi Driver and La Haine.
I did a lot a lot of research during this time of writing the script, but I also used the my own emotional compass, I had been feeling my whole life of seeing this from more than one point of view. Ultimately the point of view feeling found its way into the film's structure, which I am really glad about.
The story focuses on three characters that are very different on the surface and seem to want very different things. But ultimately they all have the same need. That was somehow the key to understanding the times we were living and still do, and also understanding the characters I was creating. I didn’t want to paint a black-and-white portrayal of the face of hate or fear, on either side. I wanted to show human beings who really believed in what they were saying and had reason to say and act the way they did.
From each characters point of view, they were seeing injustice. So I let each character speak, with their rational reasoning, but with these extreme views and actions, and I let this up to the audience to deal with, just like it is for all of us in these times we are living in.
In my view, if you want to talk about subjects like these, in order to succeed, you have to treat all your characters equal and let the audience take it all in and then deal with it.