At the opening of Lebanon’s first Danish film festival, Time Out caught up with Danish Ambassador to Lebanon, Jan Top Christensen.

Why did you choose to found a film festival as a medium to communicate Danish culture in Lebanon?
We have very limited funds for cultural activities, and therefore each year we have to choose a specific thing. Last year we chose to have published the collected works of Hans Christian Andersen in Arabic, and distributed them to all the public libraries. This year we discovered that we have a number of recent Danish films at the Embassy and we could spend the limited money we have engaging with this cinema and organising this festival, because we do believe that Danish films are different from the mainstream films to a large extent.

So will this be a one-off?
I definitely think and hope we’ll be able to do it again in the future… Danish money is put into the Screen Institute Beirut and actually they’ll be screening one of these documentaries here [at Metropolis Empire Sofil] next week. We hope this will be built up with more funds, and we’ll be able to assist creating the right facilities and conditions for an Arab film tradition at a high level – and I do believe that with the Arab uprising there’s really an ample opportunity to use the film media as a means of communicating.

‘The Experiment’, a tale based on the real-life attempted ‘Danification’ of Greenlandic children in the 1950s, is a brave choice of opening film…
Ah yes, we are not hesitant to do some Denmark-bashing! We try to be open about the problems, we do believe that giving this as an example is maybe showing to others ‘Don’t just come up with praise about yourself, but face the problems that you have been through and then deal with it.’

What else can we expect from the festival programme?
The films we are screening are very different, they don’t all have this very serious theme about them – there’s another one being shown [‘Aching Hearts’ on Apr 8] about youth and how they relate to each other, how they grow up together, by a famous director [Nils Malmros] who has being using his own childhood and youth as the substance of his films. So we try with these films we’re showing here over the two days to show the variety and the wide scope of Danish filmmaking.

To view the photo album visit Danish Film Festival.