Last year saw the highest number of cinema tickets sold for 30 years. In total, 14.2 million were purchased – nearly three per every person in the country and a 12 percent rise on last year. 

Cinema-goers rushed to see blockbusters like ‘Skyfall’ – the year’s most popular film, with 914,000 tickets sold – ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ (566,000 tickets) and Peter Jackson’s adaptation of JRR Tolkien’s geek-pleasing ‘The Hobbit’.

Meanwhile, Danish films also prospered, selling 4.1 million tickets – their second highest tally since 1981, just 100,000 adrift of the 2008 figures. Leading the way were two films by female directors. Anne-Grethe Bjarup Riis’s Second World War resistance film ‘Hvidsten gruppen’ (‘The village: One family’s sacrifice will let a country live’) was the most watched, selling 765,000 tickets, followed by Susanne Bier’s ‘All You Need is Love’ (645,000 tickets). In third place, Nikolaj Arcel’s ‘En Kongelig Affære’ (‘A Royal Affair’) sold 528,000 tickets – the first time three Danish films have sold over 500,000 tickets since 1986.

“The films also showed their strength internationally, winning awards at major festivals such as in Sundance, Berlin and Cannes,” Henrik Bo Nielsen, the managing director of the Danish Film Institute, told media.

From 272 festival nominations, Danish films won close to 30 percent of them. No fewer than four Danish films were featured in Sundance’s World Cinema categories; ‘En Kongelig’ won the awards for best actor and best script at the Berlin International Film Festival and is nominated for ‘Best Foreign Language Film’ at next month’s Oscars; and Thomas Vinterberg’s ‘Jagten’ (‘The Hunt’), which will be eligible for the Oscars next year, won the best actor award at Cannes.