A Hijacking

Tobias Lindholm's A Hijacking (Kapringen) opened at Venice 2012 in competition and won Best Danish Film at the Robert Awards. Lindholm — primary screenwriter on Thomas Vinterberg's The Hunt the same year, and on the entire Borgen series — directed the film as his second feature, on a budget of less than $4 million. It launched Pilou Asbæk into the international consciousness that Game of Thrones would later expand.

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. The film cuts between the cramped, sweat-stained hold of the captured ship, where the ship's cook Mikkel (Asbæk) becomes the crew's unofficial spokesperson, and the boardroom in Denmark, where weeks turn into months and the negotiated price climbs.

Lindholm's commitment to procedural accuracy — actual maritime negotiators consulted on the script, real Somali fishermen cast as the pirates — produced one of the most morally precise thrillers of its decade. The film refuses both the heroism of the boardroom and the demonisation of the pirates, and the closing minutes contain a moral ambiguity that lingers for days. Lindholm continued the procedural-thriller mode through A War and the Borgen reboot.