From Denmark with Love:An Interview with Filmmaker Janus Metz

by Brittany Shoot
– Denmark –

Migrant communities in Denmark are a subject fraught with debate. As South Asian women increasingly immigrate to Scandinavia, stricter laws have been enacted to discourage the practice of convenience marriages. Rumors about abuse in these communities are common. Yet in a remote western region of Denmark, nearly 600 Thai women currently live with their Danish husbands. The documentary films Love on Delivery and Ticket to Paradise follow a new couple through their wedding day and explore the possibilities for a young woman still living in Thailand. Avoiding the pitfalls of a judgmental outsider point of view, Danish filmmaker Janus Metz provides a sensitive portrayal of Thai women living in rural Denmark.

Metz recently sat down with me to talk about his work and gave me a window into why his documentaries are so poignant and how they reframe migrant women’s experiences.

How long have you been doing documentary work?

I started working on my first film [Township Boys] in 2002, which was a short film about gangsters in South Africa. My first major project was Love on Delivery. It made a big impact on Danish documentary circles, partly because it was the most-seen Danish documentary on Danish public television – it had one million viewers.

We [wanted to] make a film that would work not just for TV but for film: we have a strong narrative, and we wanted to tell the story via the imagery as well. It became a success story for collaboration between the film and television communities in Denmark, which are often very separate.

A big part of the success of this film was that it was made in collaboration with an anthropologist. [Sine Plambech] had been doing extensive fieldwork for three years, doing research with Thai and migrant communities in Denmark but also staying in the villages in Thailand. That [allowed us] to make a narrative piece – it’s a documentary, of course – but in a lot of ways, both films work almost like fiction films. You’re very much there at all of the major turning points. We were able to do that because we had so much confidence from our participants, that we were going to do something that was really going to represent them and that didn’t have a lot of prejudice from the outside. That was a precondition for them to buy into the film.

You don’t name the city where this takes place, but the Thy region instead. Was that a choice based on privacy?

It was a cinematic choice to film it that way. To me, it wasn’t so much about concrete places and people – it’s just as much about a mental space, and this mental space is characterized as being far in the countryside.

In the film, we talk about the edge of globalization, from one outskirt to another, and little people carrying these big decisions, and how one place in the outback of Thailand would have a direct influence on a place in the outback of Denmark and vice versa.

In the beginning, we wanted to make one film, talking about this whole connection, but for financial reasons, that wasn’t possible. Another side of the decision was that we also found it quite intriguing to do the first film without ever getting to Thailand. It had to exist in our imagination, and it would only be a representation of images and phone calls. Sometimes it’s more intriguing not to know everything, to have a space into which to project your fantasies. It was instead kind of this “stranger coming to town” story. You don’t know the secrets that she’s carrying, and you just know that the whole world is going to turn upside down.

That’s what these relationships are: they don’t know much about each other. In the film many things are left unspoken. It’s sort of a fragile and ambivalent encounter that is also about all kinds of projections about identity.

How was the second film, Ticket to Paradise, born out of Love on Delivery?

The second film was a realization of our larger dream – to make something to show the two-sided reality. Once the first film was a success, these people were TV darlings overnight, and everyone wanted more.

When you’re pitching something to Danish television – because we’re living in a small country that is sometimes very much closed around itself – the first reaction was, “We don’t want to see something about Thai women in Thailand.” They’d rather see something about Danish men in Thailand. But we said no. This is a story about women and women’s agency and the courage of poor women to grab hold of their own destiny and do the impossible – even prostitute themselves – in order to climb up the social ladder. Maybe it’s their only choice.

I thought this was the big story, but of course, I also liked the men, and I think there is something very beautiful in their search for companionship and love. They were willing to do anything to find someone to care for, and to find someone who would care for them. The set-up is the same, but we wanted to make a film that was different, so we focused also on the women who don’t make it. In Ticket to Paradise Saeng goes to Pattaya and we leave her there – we don’t really know whether she’s going to get out or not. We wanted to give the film hope in the end – she does meet someone – but the reality of that place is hard.

Most of the women see working in the sex industry not as an end point but as a stepping-stone, and we wanted to emphasize that. In their own perspective, it’s not as dark and sad as we want to see it from our privileged point of view. Going with that felt much more true to what these women have at stake than telling the classic story of a fallen woman who chooses to become a prostitute, and then her whole life is down the drain – because it’s not necessarily the case.

Sommai was originally a prostitute – that’s how this whole thing began, in a sense.

Yes, and that’s also how the circle closes. Sommai ends up looking back and saying that this is pretty messed up but not to think of it as the end. Saeng can think of it as the beginning to something, and you have to be strong and not worry about what everyone else says about your choice.

Why don’t some of the women bring their children when the move to Denmark?

Each relationship is different. Some women do bring their children over immediately. Sommai brought two kids right away, and Mong brought her daughter. With Basit it’s a financial issue. You have to provide for the child, and it can take a little while to establish a job in Denmark. The men that they marry are not loaded. They also may not want to put too much pressure on the guy. It’s obviously always a negotiation. How much does love buy, in a sense? It varies from couple to couple.

It also has to be said that it’s quite common that the grandparents look after the children. For any mother, it’s terrible to not live with your child, but in the Thai countryside, it’s fairly common, and often she has to work in the cities in factories, or in the country in the fields, or in the sex industry. The standard is that the grandmother takes care of the children until the mother can provide.

A lot of the women have previously been in abusive relationships. Do you think that has anything to do with the poverty in which they live?

Definitely. I think it’s a common poverty issue, in the sense that when people live in stressful situations with no money and everyday is a battle for survival, there is a bigger risk. I think it’s emasculating – if you can’t be the breadwinner and you get frustrated about that, who do you take it out on? Your wife. It’s quite common that men beat their wives in the countryside in Thailand, as it’s quite common in other poverty-stricken areas of the world.

There’s been some criticism about the films, that they were one-sided or gave a one-dimensional representation of Thai men, that they’re all just alcoholics and abusive. Obviously it’s not like that, but then again, with a film like this you can’t go into every single topic and flesh it out.

We were left with a situation in which there were some strong stories about abuse – like in Basit’s case – and it’s also a story that motivates [her husband] Frank to be the man and the hero. He has to stand up for her. It’s also a good way to give him a kick in the ass to get out of his little depressive world. That’s the drama of that love story: that he has to realize if he wants it, he has to live up to it. In that way, his story becomes the story of all of the men. It’s not free – you can’t just lean back and expect that now you bought someone to come and take care of you.

One of the first things I noticed when I visited these communities (in Thy) is that there is a lot of prejudice about these men being abusive. What I actually thought was that all of the men I met were proud of their wives. They felt their whole lives had changed. They blossomed as men. In terms of gender or sex roles, in a very traditional sense, they were able to live up to their idea of [being] a man, which they’d had problems with before.

There is a tendency to think of South Asian women as sexually available. Do you think this arrangement perpetuates that stereotype?

Where is the border between marriage, migration, and prostitution? It’s an economy of desires and longing and forsørger – the idea of economic caregiving, that you are able to provide for your family. We wanted to show the complexities of that.

Janus Metz’s next project is a documentary about Danish soldiers in Afghanistan.

Brittany’s interview is the second piece in a 2-part series
on the films of Danish filmmaker Janus Metz – Ed.

About the Author
Brittany Shoot is an American writer living in Copenhagen, Denmark. A longtime member of the Feminist Review blog editorial collective, her writing has also appeared in a variety of print and online publications including Bitch, make/shift, WireTap Magazine, and Religion Dispatches.

Brittany earned concurrent Bachelor’s degrees in Women’s Studies, Communication, and Psychology, and has a Master’s degree in Visual and Media Arts. She likes to think of herself as a recovering academic but suspects that another degree in animal ethics might be in her future. A vegan and empathic animal advocate, she hopes to eventually operate her own farm sanctuary. When she isn’t taking photos with vintage film cameras and eating avocados, Brittany can be found moonlighting as a teacher, pet sitter, and farmhand. Visit her website at www.brittanyshoot.com.