Birgitte Stærmose

In Out of Love (2009), Kosovo street children deliver staged monologues drawn from real interviews. Their testimony is being performed, and Stærmose makes that choice central to the film. Afterwar (2024) follows the same subjects into adulthood, again mixing documentary and fiction. This sustained interest in the people gives us more reason to follow her than the novelty of the method alone.

Room 304 (2011), her feature debut, established another strand: intersecting stories about intimacy, with extended scenes resembling chamber plays. Her recurring subjects are intimacy, forgiveness and human frailty, which suit a filmmaker willing to let a scene run. Her second feature, Darling (2017), takes place in the Royal Danish Ballet and was written by Kim Fupz Aakeson. He is a recurring collaborator, with three films together.

We were drawn into Industry (2020) because the young bankers’ ambition keeps making the working day more difficult. The performances held our attention, and the office politics gave us enough reason to keep watching. Stærmose directed two episodes in 2022, within a series whose pleasures and problems cannot be credited to one director. We rate it as good television, with a firm reservation about the sex and excess when they crowd out the work. That qualification matters here: the series is most engaging when it watches people trying to get ahead, and less reliable when it seems to worry that this will not be entertainment enough.

Television has not replaced the features: alongside work on The Spanish Princess (2019) and The English Game (2020), her credits include Camino (2023), which she directed and co-wrote. The return to her earlier subjects in Afterwar also makes it difficult to treat those international commissions as the destination of her career. We would start with Industry for its office politics, with some patience reserved for what happens outside working hours.