2025-12-19
50 分钟This is The Guardian.
Hi, I'm David Wolfe, and I'm the editor of The Guardian Longread.
This December, we're choosing a few of our favorite pieces from the year, and this week, I've chosen The Real Scandinoire, how a filmmaker and a crooked lawyer shattered Denmark's self-image by Samanth Subramanian.
Last year I was at a conference in Norway when I met a journalist who mentioned this TV show that everyone in Norway and Denmark was talking about.
It was a documentary called The Black Swan and it was about a lawyer who had worked for many years helping criminals launder money and commit other illegal acts.
Now she had teamed up with a documentary maker to secretly film herself meeting with gang members, petty criminals, corrupt professionals, openly arranging criminal activity.
The documentary had so scandalised the Danish in particular, because the criminality caught on camera was so brazen, and because the people involved were not just traditional underworld figures, but included seemingly respectable figures such as lawyers and business people at top firms.
The facts of the documentary are extraordinary in themselves, but the author of this piece, Saman Subramanian, adds so much in the way he tells the story of the filmmaker himself, and teases out the fascinating similarities between him and the lawyer who is the star of the Black Swan.
As he writes, the journalist may often be cast as the seducer, coaxing information out of people, but he's just as liable to be seduced by the mirage of the perfect story as clean and vivid as a comic book.
For the director, the lawyer had initially promised to provide just that.
When she turned out to be staging a perilous deception, throwing his production into chaos, he only grew further enthralled.
Perhaps because he recognized in Smajic, the lawyer, an even more skilled version of himself.
Welcome to The Guardian Long Read, showcasing the best long-form journalism covering culture, politics and new thinking.
For the text version of this and all our long reads, go to TheGuardian.com forward slash long read.
The trap was laid in a rented office, two rooms in downtown Copenhagen, furnished without a whisper of scandy style.
If it wasn't for a Frida Carlo print on one wall, the premises might have felt as impersonal and stark as a confessional.
That, in any event, was what it became.
For six months, beginning in mid-2022, a parade of people members of motorcycle gangs, entrepreneurs, lawyers, real estate barons, politicians, trooped through to recount their sins to Amira Smazik.
They didn't come for expiation.
They knew Smazik to be one of them.