This is The Guardian.

Hi, I'm David Wolfe, and I'm the editor of the Guardian Longreed.

This December, we're choosing a few of our favourite pieces from the year, and this

week I've chosen The Real Scandinore, how a filmmaker and a crooked lawyer shattered Denmark's

self-image by Samanth Subramanian. Last year I was at a conference in Norway when I met a journalist who mentioned this TV show

that everyone in Norway and Denmark was talking about.

It was a documentary called The Black Swan, and it was about a lawyer who had worked for many

years helping criminals launder money and commit other illegal acts.

Now she had teamed up with a documentary maker to secretly film herself

meeting with gang members, petty criminals, corrupt professionals, openly arranging criminal

activity. The documentary had so scandalised the Danish in particular because the criminality

caught on camera was so brazen and because the people involved were not just

traditional underworld figures, but included seemingly respectable figures such as lawyers

and business people at top firms. The facts of the documentary are extraordinary in themselves,

but the author of this piece, Saman Subramanian, adds so much in the way he tells the story of the filmmaker himself

and teases out the fascinating similarities between him and the lawyer who is the star of the Black Swan.

As he writes, the journalist may often be cast as the seducer, coaxing information out of people,

but he's just as liable to be seduced, by the

mirage of the perfect story, as clean and vivid as a comic book. For the director, the

lawyer had initially promised to provide just that. When she turned out to be staging a perilous

deception, throwing his production into chaos, he only grew further enthralled,

perhaps because he recognised in Smaich, the lawyer, an even more skilled version of himself.

...