Tobias Lindholm, one of Borgen’s writers, announces The Investigation and vows her killer will not feature

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

One of the writers behind the Danish TV hit Borgen is to turn the murder of the Swedish journalist Kim Wall into a six-part TV series – but the killer, the self-taught rocket engineer Peter Madsen, will not feature.

“I don’t want to make a crime series that is beguiled by the perpetrator or the crime,” said the director and screenwriter Tobias Lindholm in a press release announcing The Investigation. “It’s therefore a fully conscious decision that the perpetrator will at no time figure in the series.”

Wall, 30, who wrote for the Guardian and international publications such as the New York Times and Time magazine, disappeared on 10 August after joining Madsen for an interview onboard his home-built submarine.

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In April, Madsen was sentenced to life imprisonment, the country’s harshest possible sentence, for torturing, sexually assaulting and murdering the journalist, before dismembering her body and throwing it into the sea.

The series is being made in close cooperation with Kim Wall’s parents, Ingrid and Joachim Wall, as well as with the Copenhagen police’s head of homicide, Jens Møller.

“We decided early on that Kim’s fate should not be forgotten,” Wall’s parents said in the release in which they also said they trusted Lindholm to tell the story “from the right perspective and with respect for all who knew and loved Kim”.

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Lindholm said the involvement of Jensen and the Walls was “imperative” for him to be able to tackle the story with the same realism he had employed in his Oscar-nominated film A War, which was based on interviews with Danish soldiers serving in Afghanistan.

“I wish, in the same manner, to make a crime series that cuts out all the colourful stuff and depicts the reality and the facts soberly and precisely,” he said.

The film is being produced by Miso Film, a production company owned by the London-based Fremantle Media, in collaboration with Denmark’s TV 2 and Sweden’s TV4 and C More channels.







