A Hijacking, Tobias Lindholm’s first feature as a solo director (his first film, 2010’s prison drama R, was co-directed with Michael Noer) begins before its title event, with cargo ship cook Mikkel (Pilou Asbæk) calling home to his wife, and it ends after it’s all over. But the bulk of the film is a two-setting procedural, radiating verisimilitude both on-board and in the corporate offices, where a CEO (Søren Malling) personally conducts negotiations with hijackers. During an interview with Filmmaker, Lindholm spoke about the production in all its preparatory and practical aspects. Filmmaker: When I heard the sound of the […]

A hit on last fall’s festival circuit was A Hijacking, writer/director Tobias Lindholm’s smart, gripping thriller about a Danish cargo ship captured by Somali pirates. (Writing about the movie in the previous issue of Filmmaker, Aaron Hillis called it “a tack-sharp, heart-in-the-throat Danish procedural,” while Adam Cook called it the best film he saw at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival.) The critical success of A Hijacking, released stateside by Magnolia on June 14, has brought some much-deserved international attention to Lindholm, who is a highly active and well-respected figure in Denmark. He made his feature debut in 2010 with the […]

Between A Royal Affair, The Hunt, Eat Sleep Die, and now A Hijacking, it might be wise to start thinking of 2012 as something of a banner year for Scandinavian film—Denmark in particular. (Let’s call Klown the exception that proves the rule and leave it at that.) An impressively restrained thriller about a cargo ship commandeered by Somali pirates, Tobias Lindholm’s second feature has the kind of ripped-from-headlines premise one would expect Hollywood to have capitalized on by now. In an early sign of his rather un-Hollywood approach, however, the frequent Thomas Vinterberg collaborator shows us extremely little of the […]