Smell the Roses

Community, Utopia or bulldozers? In 1971 Christiania was founded by a group of young squatters who took over an abandoned military area in the middle of Copenhagen. For more than 30 years the self-governing community has existed as an urban social experiment in Denmark. Faced with extinction or urban redevelopment residents struggle to redefine a fading ideology.

The ethnographic film Smell the Roses examines the forces of community and issues of personal freedom through the viewer’s association with key residents of Christiania while introducing the theme of conflict – the luring termination of the area. The film stands as a mosaic of sociopolitical convictions centered around the paramount sense of place encompassed by the filmic portrait of a community whose future remains bleakly uncertain.

Julie Linn Milling

Julie Linn Milling (b.1977) is a graduate of The Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology, University of Manchester, England. Smell The Roses is Julie’s graduation film produced in her native country Denmark. Julie is concerned with questions of bicultural and ethnic identity, as well as communitarianism and contested space. Julie is currently living in South Funen, and runs a Video Workshop for young people with social problems in Odense.