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The trap was laid in a rented office: two rooms in downtown Copenhagen, furnished without a whisper of Scandi style. If it wasn’t for a Frida Kahlo print on one wall, the premises might have felt as impersonal and stark as a confessional. That, in any event, was what it became. For six months, beginning in mid-2022, a parade of people – members of motorcycle gangs, entrepreneurs, lawyers, real-estate barons, politicians – trooped through to recount their sins to Amira Smajic. They didn’t come for expiation. They knew Smajic to be one of them – an outlaw, and in her particular case, a business lawyer so skilled at laundering money that she’d enabled a couple of billion kroner in financial crime over the previous decade. They called her the Ice Queen, because she showed not a flicker of regret for what she did.
In her office, Smajic’s visitors bragged about dodging tax, bribing officials or exploiting the bankruptcy code. She offered them coffee and coaxed forth their confidences. Six cameras and three microphones, secreted in power sockets, captured it all – footage that was turned into a documentary called The Black Swan. In its surreptitious method and breathtaking drama, The Black Swan bore all the fingerprints of its director, Mads Brügger, a provocateur who has spent his career searching for bombshells to drop but who had never quite managed it as well as he did here. Denmark’s national bird is the Cygnus olor, a swan as white as virtue. The Black Swan, in showing such easy, unbridled formulations of crime, blew up Denmark’s idea of itself.
Since airing last May as a five-part series on TV2, Denmark’s biggest television network, The Black Swan has sent the country into convulsions. One out of every two Danes has seen the documentary. After its release, a biker-gang member and his accountant were charged with financial crimes and taken into custody; others, including a municipal official, are under investigation. The Danish Bar and Law Society formally apologised to the minister of justice for the conduct of two lawyers caught on camera; they have been either fired or disbarred. A new money-laundering law was introduced to give banks more oversight over “client accounts” – the kind of accounts in which lawyers pool the funds of several clients and transact on their behalf, and that featured in many of the machinations in Smajic’s office. In her New Year’s speech, Denmark’s prime minister suggested biker-gang criminals ought to be stripped of their pension rights – a detail so specific it was surely inspired by The Black Swan.
Other Scandinavian nations also reeled upon watching The Black Swan. After the series premiered in Sweden, a criminologist at Lund University warned: “There’s a lot of evidence that it’s probably even worse here.” Norwegian civil servants invited Brügger to Oslo in January to talk to them about money-laundering. All of Scandinavia, he believes, has persuaded itself that crime exists only in violent, poor abscesses on the edges of their societies. “The Danes totally subscribe to this idea that Denmark has no corruption, and to the idea of Denmark as the end of the road,” Brügger said, referring to the political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s notion that “getting to Denmark” is the goal of every modern democracy. “The Black Swan punctured that hallucination,” Brügger said. “It was Denmark’s red-pill moment.”
Sitting in the Copenhagen offices of Frihedsbrevet, or Freedom Letter, an investigative journalism site Brügger co-founded in 2021, I asked him what ordinarily passes for corruption in Denmark. He thought about it for a comically long time. During his boyhood, he recalled, one major scandal involved a small-town mayor being bribed with a bathroom renovation for his home. In 2011, Danish newspapers carried as front-page news the revelation that the prime minister, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, was leasing her car from Germany, saving €20 a month and depriving the exchequer of €70 a month in tax. Brügger had told a Greek friend about this brouhaha; the friend stared at him and said: “Back home, we’re talking about a politician who was given an entire island as a bribe.” Brügger also related a Frihedsbrevet scoop: Copenhagen’s leading newspaper editors had been attending a Proust book club run by a government official, a degree of socialising that Brügger characterised as unhealthy. This was, he was suggesting, the scale of grift Danes were used to – chump-change tax avoidance and highbrow hobnobbing – until The Black Swan came along.
But he was embroidering for effect. There have been graver controversies: a stock price manipulation scheme in 2008; a money-laundering case involving Danske Bank; a $1bn tax fraud case that ended in a 12-year prison sentence for its mastermind last December. Michael Bang Petersen, a political scientist at Aarhus University who studies trust in Danish society, told me that citizens’ trust in politicians has fallen by 20 percentage points since 2007. But their trust in fellow citizens has stayed stable. When asked if they can trust most people, an astonishing 80% of Danes reply in the affirmative. Lawyers, roasted as rogues practically everywhere, enjoy a glowing reputation in Denmark, and the welfare state is revered, as inviolable as a cathedral.
“We’re taught from a young age that cheating the system is not something you do, because you end up pissing on everybody,” Ane Cortzen, a television presenter and Brügger’s sister, told me. “Cheating on taxes is one of the most serious crimes you can commit.” Kalle Johannes Rose, an associate professor at Copenhagen Business School, observed: “Most Danish scandals have to do with the state – public healthcare, public banks, public something or the other. People want to know their high taxes are being spent correctly. If they don’t trust the system, they don’t pay their taxes, and then the house of cards falls down.” The Black Swan thus invited viewers to dwell on their worst nightmare: a shattering of the trust that underpins not just the smooth functioning of their beloved welfare state but the essence of what makes Danes proud to be Danes.
Amira Smajic wears her dark hair pulled back so tightly that her skin tightens around her high cheekbones. It lends her the severe, credible look of a schoolteacher, doubtless an asset during her years of crime. In her first job after university, at an accounting firm, Smajic quickly sensed they were skating close to the edge of the law. Her employer was subsequently convicted of fraud and forgery – but by then, Smajic had struck out on her own, working with Denmark’s biker gangs, which are notorious for criminality and violence. “I specialised in making accounts look as needed – getting white money to turn black and vice versa,” she says in the film. For these services, she earned several hundred thousand kroner a month. “I shopped in Louis Vuitton every week. I bought shoes like other people buy milk.”
In 2020, wearying of the paranoia and guilt of this delinquent life, Smajic thought of going public – through a book, perhaps, or a film. Having met several publishers and journalists, she eventually found her way to Brügger, and she commanded every shred of his attention. Over sushi, she told him so much about her connections with the criminal underworld that “she was clearly the real deal”, Brügger told me. He was instantly smitten, in that half-ardent, half-extractive way that journalists are with their subjects.
Brügger and TV2 first considered investigating the old contracts, emails and texts in Smajic’s files. But Michael Nørgaard, TV2’s editor-in-chief, said he was aware that Smajic had spent years engaging in fraud and forgery. “Could we believe that the materials she came to us with were intact – that she didn’t take out documents to put her in a better light?” he wondered. The idea to open a new office and clandestinely film its operations, Brügger and Nørgaard told me, came from Smajic. In a 2021 email, which Brügger showed me, Smajic excitedly laid out five pages of plans to monetise her past: articles, newsletters, podcasts, an eight-part true-crime show, the documentary, four books, the full panoply of a repentance empire. The arc, Smajic wrote, referring to herself in the third person, would be of “her social and moral redress”.
Brügger says he believed her. Smajic had come to Denmark as a child refugee from Bosnia, along with her family, and on one occasion she told Brügger that her father, who’d died of cancer, would have been disappointed that she’d turned to crime after Denmark had taken her in. “I will never get out of this life if I do nothing,” Smajic says in the first episode, with the air of a woman plotting to burn a bridge even as she flees over it. Before filming began, a security expert talked Smajic through the consequences of making the documentary, Brügger told me. “He didn’t spare her. He said she may have to relocate to another country, change her name, or not see her friends any more. She was crying, and I thought: ‘OK, that’s it. She’s out.’ But she insisted on continuing.”
Brügger and Nørgaard knew one more thing about Smajic. She was at the time, and had been for years, a police informant. On her request, they withheld that from the documentary – but they also didn’t let the police know in advance about the trap they were setting. In a brief contract, drafted at the outset of production and barely two pages long, Brügger’s producer, Peter Engel, stipulated that Smajic would be paid 30,000 kroner (roughly £3,350) a month. Engel said she also agreed to refrain from any actual criminal activity during production. In the opening minutes of The Black Swan, sitting across a desk from Smajic in a room resembling an interrogation chamber, Brügger asks her what the worst outcome of her undertaking could be. She replies: “That someone finds out and I will be liquidated before any of this is shown.”
The suspense of whether Smajic will be unmasked keeps The Black Swan as taut as a bowstring. The documentary’s more immediate shocks come from watching people methodically plan to break the law. The crimes range from the paltry to the serious. A man named Wassem, to whom Smajic introduces herself in the first episode, runs a shawarma shop and wants to skip out on tax. Fasar Abrar Raja, a grey-bearded member of a motorcycle gang called Bandidos, helps demolition crews dispose of asbestos and other toxic material without the costly safety measures the law requires. For a fee, he will bribe environmental analysts and local officials to look the other way while he dumps the material in the Danish countryside. Fasar also brings along Martin Malm, a smooth-faced businessman who launders millions of kroner a month through his “invoice factories”: companies that issue fake invoices for services never rendered. (Malm might invoice a nightclub owner for providing bouncers, say; the owner would pay Malm, who’d keep a fee and return the rest to the owner in cash or some other fashion, allowing him to avoid paying tax on it. The bouncers, needless to say, don’t exist.)
One of the film’s revelations, Brügger says in a voiceover, is the connection “between the nice-looking, everyday citizens and the underworld”. In Smajic’s presence, a lawyer named Lise Roulund delivers to Fasar a USB drive full of confidential documents she has obtained from the police – an illegal act in itself. On suspicions of money-laundering, Fasar’s bank account has been frozen, so Roulund helps him enact his tax dodges by transferring money in and out of an account she controls. Without lawyers willing to look the other way, criminal activity would seize up, Roulund says. “We’re the ones who make it go around.”
Another lawyer, named Nicolai Dyhr, a partner at one of Denmark’s most prestigious law firms, is a fount of suggestions on how to exploit the bankruptcy code. He lays out how Wassem could shutter his shawarma business, declare bankruptcy and avoid a tax debt of 2.4m kroner; he even details how Wassem could squeeze additional money out of a government fund that guarantees worker salaries while companies are going through bankruptcy. Malm, the businessman with the invoice factories, also files for bankruptcy, and Dyhr advises him to hide evidence of fraud and deliberately undervalue his businesses. (Later, Dyhr claimed he was “eel-trapping” – leading Malm on to secure him as a client, but with no plans to commit crimes. Dyhr sued TV2, demanding that all covert footage of him be edited out of the film, but lost his case. Fasar denied committing the crimes discussed on camera; Malm told TV2 it “didn’t have the whole picture”; Roulund has refused to comment.)
By themselves, the sums of laundered money bandied about run only to a few million pounds, small enough in scale that one expert described it to me as hyggekrim – crime so domestic it’s practically cosy. But all these cons purport to show how simple it is to exploit the Danish state. It was one of the earliest lessons of Smajic’s career, she says: “The state always pays.”
Some episodes of The Black Swan prickle with violence. On a trip to his native Pakistan, Fasar discusses killing a patient in a hospital – a potential witness in a trial against him. (Nørgaard told me TV2 tipped off the Danish police about Fasar’s plans.) After returning to Copenhagen, Fasar storms into Smajic’s office, threatening to “crush you with my bare hands” because she has failed to secure a Danish passport for his daughter. Without breaking character, Smajic mollifies him. By the end of the meeting, they’re reminiscing about how a mental illness diagnosis concocted years ago has kept Fasar out of prison for drug and arms trafficking offences, and he’s laughing along. It’s an astonishing performance from Smajic – like watching someone act out Hamlet while walking a high wire.
Then, in the final episode, we learn Smajic is an even more nerveless and consummate actor than we thought – that she has double-crossed Brügger himself.
From one of Smajic’s sound recorders, the producers recover a file she has deleted, and discover that she knows Wassem far better than she lets on. His name is not even Wassem, and from their conversation on the file, about transporting cash, she seems to be engaged in an entirely different caper with him, one that Brügger and TV2 know nothing about. Upon investigation, they find she has secretly been running a second office, where they suspect she has been laundering hundreds of thousands of kroner via invoice factories for other clients. (Smajic has said she never facilitated any crimes during this period.) In one case, TV2 claims to have found undiluted fraud: Smajic embezzling 65,000 kroner from a client by forwarding him emails that she’d fabricated, and that appeared to be from the tax authority. Smajic isn’t a crook on the mend at all, the film concludes; she’s a crook in the thick of committing an assortment of crimes. When she finds out that Brügger and his colleagues know about her side hustles, she demands the documentary be shelved.
All documentaries are artificial: their footage has been carefully threshed and sieved with an eye to telling a story or pushing an argument. The Black Swan, though, relies on the unblinking, real-time gaze of hidden CCTV cameras, so we lull ourselves into thinking that we’re seeing the full picture, the full truth. No such thing. Instead, we get evasion upon evasion: Smajic’s charade for her clients, Malm cheating the taxman, TV2 withholding their work from the police, Brügger keeping details from his audience. Smajic’s final bluff merely confirms what Brügger seems to have believed throughout his career: everywhere, there are conspiracies and lies that he must expose, even if he has to participate in the dissembling himself.
Brügger, who turns 53 in June, is a very tall, very bald man with a very red beard. He never seems to run out of conversational energy; whatever time of day it is, he’s likely to be ready to talk for hours, looking at you unblinkingly through his chunky spectacles as he tells you how bizarre or absurd the world really is. When I first met him, at the Frihedsbrevet offices in January, we loitered in the building’s courtyard, our pates goose-pimpling over in the Danish winter, so he could finish his cigarette. He warmed us up with fresh gossip. We had originally planned to attend, that evening, a public lecture by three TV2 journalists about The Black Swan. But Smajic had emailed the journalists a few days earlier, promising to show up and ask a few questions of her own, such as: “How does it feel to take credit for a program I pay for with my life (even though I’m still breathing, yes)?” or “How many people have you thrown under the bus against your better judgment to make your story work?”
After the documentary’s release, fearing for her safety and that of her young son, Smajic had gone into hiding, so her cameo at the lecture would have been sensational. She would bring “a bunch of friends”, she warned – and then, in a second email, added: “Have you thought about and arranged security for that night … The assessment is that my participation that evening increases the risk for both me, you and the audience.”
Citing caution, TV2 cancelled the event. I couldn’t tell if Brügger felt disappointed or vindicated – the first at the dashed prospect of seeing Smajic rising in the audience and setting it abuzz, the second at how Smajic’s emails appeared laced with an articulate derangement. “She’s an expert in creating conflict and manipulating people,” he told me. “If you plant her inside a biker gang, she could tear it apart within two weeks.”
Brügger was raised in the belief that conflict makes for great copy. His parents were journalists, and at the dinner table, his sister, Ane Cortzen, said: “We’d talk about society and politics, and you couldn’t just sit and listen. You had to have an opinion.” Cortzen remembers Brügger as an inventive child obsessed with comic books, to the point that he developed a “very black-and-white view of the world, in which some people are good and some are evil”. (On the middle finger of his right hand, Brügger wears a skull ring as homage to The Phantom, a comic-book crimefighter who wears a skintight purple suit and lives in a cave resembling a human cranium.) At university, Brügger studied film-making, and then worked at the state broadcaster, where he met his longtime producer, Peter Engel. “The best thing, I discovered, is to let him do his own stuff,” Engel said. “If you hear there’s a black market for diplomatic credentials, an ordinary journalist will say: ‘I’ll interview the broker and write a piece.’ Mads would say: ‘Let me become a fake diplomat.’ He always wants to step into his own universe.”
As a documentarian, Brügger likes to make things happen. Not for him the Attenboroughian serenity of waiting for a lion to grow hungry and then track down its antelope; he’d rather starve the lion, hobble the antelope, and then introduce both beasts into a cage to film the carnage. In all his projects, Brügger has mounted elaborate, artificial setups just like Smajic’s office, and lured people into self-indictment, folly or sudden disclosures. Most of his films pivot on Brügger pretending to be someone he isn’t. In The Red Chapel, which won a Sundance award in 2010, he plays the manager of a pair of comedians touring North Korea. In The Ambassador, he impersonates a Liberian diplomat in Central African Republic. His cameras are, if not hidden, claiming to be present for benign purposes. In Pyongyang with his comedians, Brügger’s tapes were screened every night by a government agency; the film’s splenetic views of North Korea – “a sanctuary for crazy people” – emerge in the edits and in Brügger’s voiceovers. As in The Black Swan, the most burning question in these films is always: will someone tear the facade away and expose Brügger?
Even in Cold Case Hammarskjöld, in which Brügger tamely appears as himself – a film-maker smelling conspiracy behind the death of Dag Hammarskjöld, the UN secretary general, in a 1961 plane crash – he cannot resist a splash of play-acting. He wears an all-white outfit, down to his sneakers, because, as he says in his narration: “I know for a fact that the villain of this story, he wore only white.” Brügger fails to prove that this villain – a long-dead South African mercenary – actually brought down Hammarskjöld’s plane, but that kind of factfinding is, in any case, never the priority of his films. “Hammarskjöld was a ticket to all the things I really enjoy: tracking down mercenaries, telling tales of evil men who dress in white, [and] rumours about secret African societies,” Brügger says in one voiceover. He’s always out for spectacle, shock and a wild ride. “If Hunter S Thompson had gone into film and ditched all the drugs,” a Norwegian columnist wrote of Cold Case Hammarskjöld, “maybe this is what he could have ended up with.”
Brügger’s approach can leave his collaborators uneasy. When I spoke to one of the comedians in The Red Chapel, he euphemistically called Brügger’s journalism “uncompromising,” adding: “Mads is often portrayed as either a villain or a genius – and maybe he’s both.” An early collaborator described Brügger to me as ruthlessly ambitious – someone who wouldn’t hesitate to pilfer an idea or sell out a friend to make good TV. But he admits Brügger can be charming and persuasive, and I know what he means. When Brügger outlines his outre philosophies of journalism – of orchestrating scenarios and entering them – you feel like a mug for having arranged an interview in a cafe.
It’s often unclear what Brügger is setting out to discover, what facts he’s seeking to establish. In The Red Chapel, even as his comedians rehearse on a riverbank, Brügger declares he wants to “expose the very core of the evil in North Korea” – an aim as grand and adolescent as it is vague. (As it happens, he never even makes it out of his minders’ line of sight.) As a Liberian diplomat in The Ambassador, Brügger tries to buy blood diamonds, pretends he wants to start a match factory in Central African Republic (CAR), and arranges to tour a “Pygmy village”. The CAR is a place with no moral boundaries, he tells us, and so it “offers itself as a sort of Jurassic Park for people longing for the Africa of the 1970s”. He circles some sort of exposé – evidence of how illicitly obtained diplomatic papers can be used to smuggle diamonds and commit other crimes – but never quite pins it to the mat. By the end of Cold Case Hammarskjöld, similarly, Brügger has proven no conspiracy. The ride has been weird, but the case remains cold.
Only in The Mole, a story of such reckless and dogged infiltration that it might have been hatched by an intelligence agency, does Brügger obtain more orthodox journalistic results. Ulrich Larsen, a retired chef who had watched The Red Chapel, tracked Brügger down in 2010 and volunteered as a spy within the Copenhagen chapter of the Korean Friendship Association. Brügger gave him cameras and instructed him to film everything. “I thought I’d just be showing these Danish guys as Monty Python weirdos doing silly walks,” Larsen told me. Instead, under Brügger’s supervision, Larsen posed so effectively as a sympathiser that he wound up penetrating the heart of North Korea’s influence network better than any full-time spy – and filmed himself doing it, to boot. With an accomplice, he duped North Korean officials into thinking he was setting up a drug and arms factory in Uganda – part of a plan to make enough money to buy North Korea weapons despite prevailing sanctions. The con ran a full decade – so long that Brügger sometimes clean forgot about it for months on end.
Brügger wouldn’t necessarily quibble with these characterisations of his movies. “I’m a film-maker who craves sensation,” he says in The Mole, and that he does provide. His tone is caustic, his characters are colourful, and his plot twists are what Lotte Folke Kaarsholm, the opinion editor at the Danish daily Politiken, wryly calls “maximalist”. During one of our conversations, Brügger quoted Jørgen Leth, the doyen of Danish documentarians, to describe their line of work as “laying a trap in the forest and then waiting behind a tree to see who falls in”. Later, I looked up the quote and found that Leth had talked about setting a trap for reality, to capture the most authentic version of the world. “We are relaxed, attentive and noncommittal,” he said in a 2000 interview. “Things happen when they happen.” Leth was advocating patience and preparation; Brügger was thinking of a literal trap to tempt someone into making a mistake.
One morning in Copenhagen, I visited Smajic’s lawyer, who led me into a conference room, laid his mobile on the table, and dialled her on speakerphone. The previous day, she’d been convicted in a different case of a million-kroner fraud; the following week, she would be sentenced to 18 months in prison. When we spoke, she was still in hiding, but there wasn’t a trace of anxiety in her voice. She complimented me on pronouncing her name correctly, and said she’d spoken to no other journalist since the documentary’s release. Midway through our conversation, while mentioning the episode during which Fasar threatened her, I told her I was appalled that journalists had put her in that position. I did mean it, but it’s also the sort of thing a journalist says, with exaggerated concern, to gain someone’s confidence. “That’s the first time someone has been sympathetic and said that,” she told me – something I knew to be false, because I’d read Danish columnists expressing the same views. Later, I learned that I was also not the first journalist to interview her about the film.
Smajic believes she’s a victim of journalistic deceit. The Black Swan was meant to be about her life, she said, with the hidden camera footage being used only sparingly to corroborate her stories. She’d been offered no security during the filming, she said. When TV2 screened the first three episodes for her approval, they were really just raw, unedited clips, she maintained, and in any case, she’d been strongly medicated after a surgery and couldn’t assess them with a clear mind. (“Amira watched the edited episodes, they just needed finalising,” TV2’s Nørgaard told me. “During the four hours she spent with the editorial team that day, she appeared unaffected and seemed coherent, as we also documented in the series.”) Smajic hadn’t been running any other office at the time, she said to me, and in any case, “they hadn’t bought the rights to every single moment in my life”.
Smajic felt betrayed. “For two years, these people were telling me to go through with it, saying: ‘This is going to be the biggest thing. You’re going to be a star.’” When she began worrying that the documentary would place her in danger, she asked for it to be suspended. “They figured that if they made me out to be a criminal, I wouldn’t have a say,” she told me. Early in 2024, months before The Black Swan was due to be broadcast, Smajic sued for an injunction against the film. A court denied her plea on grounds of public interest. In its verdict, it decided Smajic was fully aware of the project’s risks, the protection that TV2 arranged for her, and the ambit of the documentary.
Among those who think Smajic was treated poorly is Jacob Mollerup, a veteran of the Danish media and a co-founder of Foreningen for Undersøgende Journalistik (FUJ), an association of investigative journalists. Mollerup described The Black Swan as “an exceptional production”, but argued Brügger had prized his dramatisation too much, abandoning fairness and balance in the bargain. “Normally, you protect your sources, but here they say: ‘Now she’s just a criminal, she broke our contract, so we can set aside her wishes about the production,” Mollerup told me. Hiding Smajic’s ongoing work as a police informant from The Black Swan’s viewers was dishonest, he said. If she was telling her handlers everything about the sting as it happened, that made it an operation implicitly sanctioned by the police – and plunged it into all sorts of ethical murk. Was Smajic inviting into her lair suspects whom the police wanted to nab? Which of the crimes being planned on camera were actually carried out, and how? Mollerup believes journalists must be transparent about their methods and precise in documenting misdeeds. When The Black Swan won an FUJ prize, he gave up his membership. “I told them: ‘This is not what I worked for.’”
Brügger briskly rejected all of Smajic’s statements. She’d often claimed to be on medication before, he said, including once when she was pleading loss of memory while testifying in another criminal trial. She was merely recycling this excuse to explain to me why she hadn’t objected to the advance cuts of the first three episodes, Brügger told me. On his laptop, he found a photo of a production team’s stakeout that had been in place throughout the sting, in an office near Smajic’s. The team constantly watched the feed from the hidden cameras, ready to summon security if things went south – a setup she knew about, he said. When I wondered if the police had known of Smajic’s parallel adventures in money-laundering, or perhaps even endorsed them for their own purposes, Brügger said: “I find it highly unlikely, but it’s a possibility. The police wouldn’t confirm or deny this anyway.”
Nothing I learned from Smajic solved the central mystery of The Black Swan: why did she choose to capsize her life by participating at all? Janet Malcolm, the deft vivisectionist of the psyche in journalism, would argue that such masochistic tendencies can be found in anyone who volunteers to talk to the press. But Smajic wasn’t just anyone: she was a habitual lawbreaker, so for her to let a television crew into the darkest corners of her life felt positively self-destructive. Perhaps she did think of exposure as disinfectant, a step towards a cure. Perhaps she believed she could bear any waves of bad press, or even surf them towards fame and freedom. “The thing is,” Brügger said, “with Amira, you can just never be sure of anything.”
He said this with the kind of awe that one veteran trickster reserves for another. Despite the lies and lawsuits, Brügger remains magnetised by Smajic. In one conversation, he’d mentioned his sole contribution to the decor of Smajic’s office: a print of The Two Fridas, in which Frida Kahlo painted herself twice, once with a gaping hole in her chest cavity, and again with a healthy heart and a small picture in her hand. “I’d hoped someone would come in and ask about it, but I didn’t prepare Amira for that,” Brügger said. This trap-within-a-trap is sprung in the fourth episode by a motorcycle thug’s curiosity, but Smajic improvises like a maestro. “It’s only when you cut out the heart that you can think coldly and rationally,” she explains. The picture the second Kahlo holds is of her child, Smajic ad-libs: “You can’t be cold if you have a family … That was me then, and this is me now.”
Brügger was delighted. “It was brilliant. I became so happy and excited when I saw that. It’s my favourite scene.” The journalist may often be cast as the seducer, coaxing information out of people, but he’s just as liable to be seduced – by the mirage of the perfect story, as clean and vivid as a comic book. For Brügger, Smajic had initially promised to provide just that. When she turned out to be staging a perilous deception, throwing his production into chaos, he only grew further enthralled – perhaps because he recognised in Smajic an even more skilled version of himself.
It’s difficult to feel sorry for Smajic, or for anyone in The Black Swan. The most moving passages in Brügger’s films always involve peripheral players in the great jape: the Ugandan villagers who are told they will be relocated so that an arms factory can be built on their land; or the North Korean interpreter who weeps at the memorial to Kim Il-Sung, claiming she’s mourning him but possibly grieving for some other reason; or the Central African Republicans who take lessons in how to make matches in a factory that Brügger will never build. To his credit, Brügger acknowledges the odd pang of guilt in his voiceovers – but only in passing.
For The Ambassador, Brügger flew an Indian match-exporter named Sumeet Mehta to the CAR for a few days, ostensibly to train his employees. The Ambassador came out in 2011, but until I called him recently, Mehta didn’t know he’d featured in a documentary – or, indeed, that Brügger was a film-maker and not a diplomat. “I was kind of afraid to go, but I went anyway,” Mehta said, sounding baffled. “I sensed this factory was some kind of gimmick, but I didn’t know the reason behind it.” Ulrich Larsen told me that he wonders about the repercussions that the North Koreans unwittingly cast in The Mole might have suffered. “The rough answer is: I’m not responsible for what the regime does,” Larsen said. He hoped that “Mr Kang”, his translator in Pyongyang, was all right, “but of course, nobody knows. I did what I could. I brought his daughter a Lego.” Like Brügger, Larsen seemed to write it off as the cost of making an engrossing film. As Brügger says in The Red Chapel: “For your sake and mine, I have to lie.”
The Black Swan is such a careful, hermetically sealed production that it yields no such collateral damage, and I wondered if it was because Brügger was less cavalier in his own country, with his compatriots. Most journalists begin their careers at home before venturing farther afield. Brügger’s has run in reverse – in part, I think, because he, too, had once bought into the image of Denmark as a safe, dull place where nothing ever happens. “I’ve come to Africa because Europe has become old and tired,” he says in The Ambassador – a sentence that could have been uttered by a European man in any of the last half-dozen centuries. It was a backhanded jibe: a suggestion that Europe was no longer troubled by the anarchic social disorder that he desires in his films. The Black Swan showed Brügger can find all that he craves at home: conspiracy, corruption, shape-shifters, sensation, stories that evaporate like dry ice or swallow you like quicksand. The world is full of lies, not least the ones we tell ourselves.
