A Hijacking

Tobias Lindholm's A Hijacking (Kapringen) opened at Venice 2012 in competition and won Best Danish Film at the Robert Awards. It was his second feature as director, made on a budget of less than $4 million. The same year he was primary screenwriter on Thomas Vinterberg's The Hunt, and he had written on the entire Borgen series. The film also brought Pilou Asbæk the international attention that Game of Thrones would later widen.

Somali pirates seize the Danish cargo ship MV Rozen in the Indian Ocean, and the shipping company's CEO, Peter Ludvigsen (Søren Malling), decides against expert advice to negotiate the ransom himself, by phone, from a glass-walled Copenhagen boardroom. Lindholm cuts between the cramped, sweat-stained hold of the captured ship, where the cook Mikkel (Asbæk) becomes the crew's unofficial spokesperson, and the boardroom in Denmark, where weeks turn into months and the negotiated price keeps climbing.

Lindholm insisted on procedural accuracy (real maritime negotiators consulted on the script, real Somali fishermen cast as the pirates), and the result is one of the most morally precise thrillers of its decade. It finds no heroism in the boardroom and does not demonise the pirates either, and the moral questions it leaves you with take days to settle. Lindholm kept working in the procedural-thriller mode with A War and the Borgen reboot.