It must have been around 1993 that I first visited Christiania. I was in Copenhagen with a friend to celebrate New Year’s Eve.
We had visited Christiania during the daytime and had enjoyed the hippie and squatter vibe. These also existed in Amsterdam, where we were from, but scattered around the city. In Christiania, however, they had all been centralised in one large former military compound covering around 32 hectares, which was first squatted in 1971.
Christiania had since then become famous for its officially tolerated cannabis trade, but coming from Amsterdam, we were rather immune to that. We found the maze of self-built houses, small shops and lovely, quiet waterside living areas much more interesting than touristy Pusher Street, where the drug trade was centred.
We returned at night for New Year’s celebrations, and found the atmosphere both more magical, with campfires under starry skies, and more grim, with fireworks exploding all over the place and drunken kerfuffles around Pusher Street. We left when police arrived – we had heard about a major police raid just a week before.
Watching debutant director Karl Friis Forchhammer’s documentary Christiania, it turns out we got a pretty good impression that time of both aspects of the DIY enclave, or “social experiment” as the documentary calls it. On the one hand, there was the self-ruled alternative society created by artists, freethinkers and others who didn’t fit in “out in Denmark,” as the Christianites called it. On the other, there were the problems associated with trying to organise your own community partly outside of Denmark’s jurisdiction. Chief among them the trade in cannabis, which, as in Amsterdam, had become increasingly professionalised by organised crime, conflated with hard drugs and run by people who cared less about community, more about personal profit.
One problem was that all major decisions in Christiania, home to around one thousand people, had to be made by consensus during so-called Community Meetings – so the troublemakers themselves could always oppose any outcome they didn’t like.
For the outside world, Pusher Street often dominated conversations about Christiania. For those who lived there, or were born there, it’s only one part of a much wider and much more positive tale of self-government, community spirit, shared values and a profound sense of freedom.
Forchhammer’s parents lived in Christiania, but moved out the day he was born – we don’t get to hear why, but presumably they had their doubts about raising a child there. But Forchhammer grew up with their magical stories, always wondering “whether I was spared or denied a childhood at Christiania.” And when he started hanging around there himself, he felt the friends he made there were different, “had lived more,” had experienced both more fun and more serious things.
The documentary features an enormous wealth of archival material and includes never-before-seen footage, shot by Forchhammer, of a secret meeting of a subgroup of Christianites discussing how to get rid of Pusher Street. Together with Forchhammer’s own voice-over, different interview voices are meanwhile edited together as if Christiania speaks more or less with one voice – a simplification, of course.
We only witness only brief moments of clashing opinions during the Community Meetings, which in truth, I’m sure, can become very heated and probably last for hours. God knows the meetings at my own collectively run workplace do – and we don’t even need consensus (the documentary never explains how the Community Meeting finally manages to reach consensus about shutting down Pusher Street while the dealers themselves are present). Other things, like Christiania turning into one of Copenhagen’s major tourist destinations, aren’t even mentioned at all.
Which is to say, that Forchhammer can’t quite hide the fact that he loves the place, warts and all, and probably paints the community as more harmonious than it actually is. Even when someone tells us that “Christiania isn’t idyllic; no society is,” he accompanies it with what can only be described as idyllic images of parents and children relaxing in the sunshine.
But to be fair, who could blame him? Christiania managed to win the hearts of the public, and even some politicians, with their entertaining protests and artistic interventions. And sure, maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to have an alcoholic bear on the premises (one of the stories that has been recreated with impressive animation), but interrupting the live broadcast of the US bicentennial, with hundreds of millions of viewers worldwide, dressed as Native Americans on horseback (carrying small plastic bags filled with red paint so that any police intervention would become part of the show)? Definitely pretty badass.
Meanwhile, the documentary’s honest acknowledgement of the larger problems (including a Jesus cult trying to take over the area, who only left after the promised 1973 destruction of the Earth didn’t materialise – but not before burning down their house as part of “God’s will”) and mistakes (inviting all of Denmark’s biker gangs to a party) only reinforce its main implicit message: that the world is a better place for having Christiania in it.
And when, at the end of the documentary, I see the Christianites celebrating New Year’s Eve around a fire again, I can only think back fondly to that other New Year’s celebration I attended more than thirty years ago – including the occasional ducking for rogue fireworks.
Denmark, 2026, 93 minutes
Director Karl Friis Forchhammer
Production Tambo Film
Producers Rikke Tambo
International sales Tambo Film
Script Karl Friis Forchhammer
Editing Michael Aaglund
Sound Rune Thuelund
Music Marco Twellmann
Christiania is one of six European documentaries selected for the EUROPE! Docs programme, devised by EFP and CPH:DOX.
