When Mr. Hooper visited Copenhagen for the first time last year, he “completely fell in love” with it, he said. In the film he wanted to pay homage to the city and the blue-gray paintings of the 19th century artist Vilhelm Hammershoi, whose works Mr. Ebershoff called “masterpieces of subdued longing.”
Tightknit Denmark — current population: 5.6 million — has been defined for more than a century by a sense of social tolerance. The 19th century concept of cultural radicalism, with its critical attitude toward Victorian sexual restraint, has been incredibly influential, said the film historian Casper Tybjerg, a professor at the University of Copenhagen. “Sex is considered something natural and shouldn’t be regulated,” he said.
Five years before her countrywomen won the right to vote in 1915, the Danish movie star Asta Nielsen stunned audiences by playing a liberated woman who is to marry a vicar’s son but who runs off with a circus performer in “The Abyss.” During one dance number, she gyrates against her lover. “It’s very overtly sexual in a way that was quite striking to contemporaries,” Mr. Tybjerg said.
He also said a “nonjudgmental strain” appears throughout movies in the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s. The first color live action film made in Denmark, “Kispus,” from 1956, features a lovably eccentric fashion designer, Mr. Marcel. “Quite clearly, this character is marked as a gay man in the film, and it’s not something that’s made fun of,” Mr. Tybjerg said. Other daring movies include “Venom” (1966, also known as “Gift”), about a hedonistic young man who films his sexual dalliances and watches hard-core pornography — though the explicit footage was then censored with big white crosses.
The end of film censorship in 1969
