PARADOX is celebrated in the film ‘Sådan Set er Byen’  (‘In a Way the City is’), which contemplates the strangeness and absurdity within the familiarity of urban life. The film is constructed around an excerpt from Inger Christensen’s poem ‘Det’ (‘It’), which itself portrays the city as an ever-changing space loaded with paradox. Rather than translating her poetry directly into a vision of the city, Sådan Set er Byen willfuly loses its way in continual misinterpretations of the poem’s verse.

The kaleidoscopic, Chinese box vision of the city in ‘Sådan Set er Byen’ uses the everyday spaces of apartments, back-yards, elevators and metro stations as a backdrop against which the city’s diverse dreams are played out. These take the form of enigmatic cycles of adaptation and reinvention, culminating in a sombering endgame of squaring the circle.