The six-part family saga produced by Zentropa for TV2 Denmark, is currently in the development stage.

Vinterberg has co-penned the screenplay with Bo Hr Hansen (Department Q-Journal 64, The Art of Crying) and will direct the full series. 

Families like Ours (Familier som vores) explores what happens when a country is being slowly evacuated, and people are forced to leave everything behind them.  The storyline in the official press statement is the following: 

“In Families like Ours, everything is as usual in Denmark, in fact better, because the sun is high this summer. But ahead awaits a new era in which the country is slowly being evacuated. We must say goodbye to what we love, to what we know, to what we are. Over the next few years, Denmark will emigrate in different directions. Only houses, schools and empty streets remain… until the water slowly makes its entrance.“

“Those who can afford it can travel to ‘good’ countries - those who do not have much, must travel with a public programme, to more challenging places. Families, friendships and couples in love will be separated. Hatred and division will arise among some, love and reconciliation among others. All property is suddenly worthless, all fortunes changed, and happiness among the travelling Danes only hits the lucky ones.”

Sisse Graum Jørgensen - associated to Vinterberg’s films The Hunt, The Commune and the upcoming Another Round, is producing with Kasper Dissing for Zentropa.

The show commissioned by TV2 Denmark with support from the Danish Film Institute’s Public Service Fund is set to start filming late 2021/early 2022. 

Katrine Vogelsang, TV2 Denmark’s Head of Drama said: “Thomas Vinterberg is in a class of his own, and since he helped found the Dogma films in the nineties with, among other things, his own breakthrough film The Celebration, he has time and again shown his talent for telling stories of fate we will never forget.”

Vinterberg’s latest film Another Round received the Cannes Label and will next be showcased at Toronto and San Sebastian. The film’s theatrical release in Denmark via Nordisk Film is set for September 24.