Christiania is a movie about an anarchic hippie commune.

Danish director Karl Friis Forchhammer’s Christian is not only a story of anarchy, violent biker gangs, drug traffickers, and an alcoholic black bear, but also a story of peace-loving hippies seeking a better world. The film, which has its world premiere Friday at Copenhagen’s documentary festival CPH:DOX, is an insider’s look at the nominally autonomous commune in Denmark’s capital. Verità Films is now handling international sales.

The director describes Christiania, which was established in 1971 as a result of the occupation of a former military base, as “one of the world’s largest democratic social experiments, in which 1,000 people created a parallel society with their own rules.” Freetown “has become a place where everything is tolerated,” Fries Forschhammer told Variety from his apartment in Christiania. The central question he poses is: “How can we tolerate everything and maintain a place that is livable?”

The problem of drug trafficking and biker gang violence related to the drug business posed an existential threat to Christiania. This illegal trade centered on Pusher Street, which Friis Forchhammer calls “the most violent street in Denmark.” Two years ago, residents chose to dig up the streets to drive out dealers after two shootings.

Christiania has been portrayed countless times in the media, but the key difference is that this film was shot by an insider. Fries Forchhammer’s personal connection to the region goes back to his childhood. “My parents met at Christiania. My father was wearing a rainbow-patterned sweater at Central Station, and my mother saw him and thought, “I want to marry this person,”” he explains. When his mother told a friend about the young man at the train station, it was explained that the rainbow sweater was associated with the “Christiania Defense Forces,” residents of the commune fighting against attempts to shut down the government.

His mother went to Christiania, found a mysterious man, married him, and had two children there. When their third child, Karl, was born, they moved out the same day. “So I was tricked out of my childhood here, and they told me stories about this crazy place, like the story about the alcoholic black bear who lived downstairs, and the story about the guy who was underwater and escaped the police by breathing through a straw. All these fantastical stories,” he says.

“And when I started coming here as a teenager, I thought, ‘This would make a great movie,’ and I started collecting all the stories. And then when all the old Christians started dying, I thought, ‘I have to make this movie now.'” That’s why I started making it. ”

Thirty-five years after his parents left the neighborhood, Friis Forchhammer moved to Christiania himself and now participates in community meetings where residents decide on issues that affect the area. Its central principle is that consensus needs to be reached, rather than decisions being made by majority vote. “Having to make decisions with people you disagree with or don’t share your core values ​​isn’t necessarily a bad thing,” he says.

One of the decisions the residents had to agree on was whether to cooperate when Friis Forchhammer told them he was making a film about them. “They tend to be a lot suspicious of people coming in from the outside. But Christiania’s greatest currency is time. Are you spending time here? So when I kept coming out here, they saw that I took it seriously.”

“Another factor in my favor is that my father was a doctor in Christiania. He started a practice here and continued to be a local doctor when he moved. Half of Christiania had my father as a doctor. And I look like my father, so when I started out here they realized it was a doctor’s son, and that helped.”

“So I had one foot out of Christiania and one foot in. That was essential, because it took a lot of trust to go into the heart of Christiania like I did and film community gatherings.”

Three weeks ago, Friis Forschhammer showed the film to residents. “We had a really good response, some of them crying,” he says. “They looked at their old lives when they were younger and took it all seriously. It became something that people flocked to. It was very deep and there was a good response, which made me really happy. It’s not showing it in too flattering or an overly negative way, so we’re trying to find a balance. So I was very interested to see how they took it, but they took it in a good way. They’re so happy.” ”

One of Christiania’s former residents, a black bear called Rikke, did not attend the screening. He was kept by a man named Jacob who lived downstairs from Fries Forchhammer’s parents. It’s unclear how Jacob came to own the bear, and the filmmaker explains that there are various versions of the story: “Some say he traded the bear for a case of beer. Others say a man who was tired of the bear ruining his love life gave it to Jacob. Others say he played poker. But he got this bear and started bringing it into his house while delivering beer in an old horse-drawn cart.”As a party trick, he taught the bear how to drink beer, and the bear loved it and started drinking a lot.

“My father told me, and I don’t know if it’s true, that he was at a party one time, and he was standing there with a beer in his hand, and a bear’s paw just grabbed it. That may sound too stupid to be true, but there are some other things that sound too stupid to be true.”

When the bear grew large and aggressive (according to the filmmakers, it killed a cat) it had to be caged, but after the outbreak a decision was made to remove the bear from Christiania. “A man called Ole lured the bear out with an egg, and when he dropped the egg, the bear attacked him and his skin came off, and from that time on he became known as Ole the Bear Fighter. But they put the bear in a car and took him to a rural location, where he lived until 2016, so he was almost 50 years old when he died.”

“Christian” was produced by Rikke Tambo Andersen for Tambo Film.