Besides the description of the scandal for non-Danish audiences, this was also an interesting reflection on the deception inherent in the production of any kind of documentary work, even when it's portrayed as straight CCTV footage.
> All documentaries are artificial: their footage has been carefully threshed and sieved with an eye to telling a story or pushing an argument. The Black Swan, though, relies on the unblinking, real-time gaze of hidden CCTV cameras, so we lull ourselves into thinking that we’re seeing the full picture, the full truth. No such thing. Instead, we get evasion upon evasion: Smajic’s charade for her clients, Malm cheating the taxman, TV2 withholding their work from the police, Brügger keeping details from his audience. Smajic’s final bluff merely confirms what Brügger seems to have believed throughout his career: everywhere, there are conspiracies and lies that he must expose, even if he has to participate in the dissembling himself.
> ...Smajic believes she’s a victim of journalistic deceit. The Black Swan was meant to be about her life, she said, with the hidden camera footage being used only sparingly to corroborate her stories. She’d been offered no security during the filming, she said. When TV2 screened the first three episodes for her approval, they were really just raw, unedited clips, she maintained, and in any case, she’d been strongly medicated after a surgery and couldn’t assess them with a clear mind. (“Amira watched the edited episodes, they just needed finalising,” TV2’s Nørgaard told me. “During the four hours she spent with the editorial team that day, she appeared unaffected and seemed coherent, as we also documented in the series.”) Smajic hadn’t been running any other office at the time, she said to me, and in any case, “they hadn’t bought the rights to every single moment in my life”.