Denmark always has surprises up its sleeve for those paying a little attention and here are two good examples, at least, to me!

First, when you get to know Denmark’s cinema, what comes to mind first are great dramas and dark comedies… But when I heard about a Danish Western, I was a bit confused. I can imagine Vikings movies just fine, but Danes riding horses and chasing each other to have revenge shootouts?? Not so much.

I made a little bit of research to find out that about 1 500 000 Americans are fully or partially of Danish descent!! That is a lot of semi-Danes running around South the border!

So there have been Danish cow boys (how cool must they have been?!?) and Kristian Levring was bright enough to pick the coolest Dane ever, Mads, to portray the main character of his 2014 movie “The Salvation”. When I saw it, my only deception was that there was not more Danish spoken, but Mads can speak Chinese to me if he wishes to… I’ll listen!

 

 

Second surprise along my quest, Danish Reggae!

To say the truth, when I first heard Danish, to my North American ears, it sounded a bit like people talking backwards. It was a little weird. But as I developed my ear to it, I started to really appreciate the phonetics of it, and I started to listen to more and more music with the great help of my Danish friend.

Ok… Let’s clear something. I am not going to name names here (except famous ones, of course) But it is getting tiring to talk about my Danish girl friend… So, we’ll call her Pippa! Because it is more convenient, and because I think she’d like that!

So, Pippa made me discover a lot of Danish music, and I had my soft rock, rock, hip hop favorites. And then, one day, she sent me some Danish Reggae… Wow! What a language and a music genre mix I wasn’t expecting! Yet, to me it works, and you can try it out below…

 

 

And I know I have a lot of surprises ahead of me still… I’ll keep you posted !