Crossing Borders Made Easy

You don’t need to blow up a hundred balloons, build a giant catapult or commandeer a swan-shaped boat to take a trip to Sweden – let transit company Skånetrafiken do the hard work for you. That’s the message in this comic triptych of films from HOBBY director Laura Hancock.

The films focus on the fanciful attempts of various Danes to reach Sweden, so it seems appropriate the production was a collaboration between Danish/American director Hancock and the fertile minds at Swedish agency Infab.

“Danish humour is a little darker than Swedish, but the agency and client were incredibly open to that. That’s what makes these films so funny. The man yelling at his wife in the boat - while she doesn’t react at all - got a great reaction from Danish audiences. We all know the feeling of being sick of our partner and we also all know the feeling of wanting them to be quiet. That way of speaking directly or being completely unbothered just resonates with the Danes.”

The bickering couple were in fact background extras that Hancock had worked with before. “In a previous life I worked as a background extra coordinator and I met lots of very funny and talented people who were eager to act but were never given the chance. They improvised the whole argument and it was very funny to watch. I actually had to hold them back a bit, they really went for it!”

For Hancock, performance is the heart of comedy and she puts a lot of effort into finding a cast that can find the funny.

“I like to mix it up when it comes to casting. The guy on the catapult is a Danish performance actor, because I needed someone who could hit the physical comedy as he hit the dirt. The woman with the balloons had to be a great actor to capture that frustration. That sound she makes at the end - øv! - is a specific Danish thing. There’s no word for it in any other language, but every Dane gets it. I really wanted to get that in there and the agency let me go for it. She was actually Swedish so it took a bit of time to get the inflection just right. But she nailed it.”

The films were shot in one day on Mormorstranden (Granny Beach) in Denmark in October 2023. The timing was extremely fortunate as days later Denmark suffered the worst flooding since records began. “48 hours after the shoot, there was no beach,” says Hancock. “It was great planning by the producers to push the storm back by two days…”

Weather had another part to play in the production. While figuring out how to build the catapult, Martin, Lars and the rest of the awesome team from Van Horn (Production Design) noticed a tree in Lars’ garden that was about to be blown over by a raging storm and demolish a glasshouse. “They rushed out to cut the tree down and realised - this is the perfect catapult,” recalls Hancock. “So they took it down, put it on a truck and drove it cross-country to the beach. Those guys made magic come to life!”

Ultimately, Hancock credits the films’ success to the collaborative and creative spirit that HOBBY, Infab and Skånetrafiken all shared - As she points out, “I like to have as much as possible aligned before the shoot, so we have the time and space to concentrate on the acting. That’s the Alpha Omega as to whether a film is funny or not. They trusted the process and gave me that freedom. Because if you’re going to make something funny, you need to have fun while you’re making it. And we really did on this one”