On 21 March 1945, a Royal Air Force raid aimed at the Gestapo headquarters in Copenhagen went catastrophically wrong when some of the bombers struck a school instead. The Shadow in My Eye reconstructs that day from street level.
What is The Shadow in My Eye about?
The mission was meant to be a precision strike: destroy the Gestapo's Copenhagen headquarters and, with it, a central piece of the occupation's machinery in the Danish capital. What followed became one of the darkest accidents of the war's final months. Several bombers misidentified their target, and a school full of children took the blast. More than 120 people were killed, 86 of them children. Ole Bornedal's film follows ordinary Copenhageners, the schoolchildren, the adults responsible for them and the aircrews overhead, through the hours surrounding the raid, letting the audience carry the weight of what the characters cannot yet know.
About the cast
Ester Birch, Alex Høgh Andersen and Danica Ćurčić lead an ensemble that also includes James Tarpey, Patricia Schumann, Fanny Leander Bornedal, Mads Riisom and Jens Sætter-Lassen. The cast spans children and adults, which matters for a film whose emotional weight rests on the youngest faces on screen. The performances stay restrained throughout, avoiding melodrama where the events themselves need none.
Context & significance
Ole Bornedal directs this Danish production, released in 2021 and running 101 minutes, in the drama, historical and war categories. The raid it depicts remains one of the most painful chapters of Denmark's wartime occupation. Rather than staging the attack as spectacle, the film takes a civilian's-eye view and gives the run-up as much screen time as the strike itself, so the loss registers as the loss of specific people rather than a statistic. For viewers who know the Second World War mainly through its major fronts, it opens a window on a smaller, less familiar theatre and on how a carefully planned operation could turn on a single moment of misidentification.
Watching The Shadow in My Eye on Ktime
The Shadow in My Eye streams on K-Time with a Persian dub, so Farsi-speaking viewers can follow the story without reading along; a Persian subtitle track is not currently listed. Log in with a free K-Time account to watch. This page is free to read, and the service's Farsi interface makes it straightforward to find European war dramas alongside Persian-language titles.