Copenhagen Expats follows Jia, a Korean-American artist who gets dumped by text the moment she lands in Copenhagen and decides to stay anyway. The season follows her attempt to build a life from scratch: learning the language, chasing work as an artist, and slowly assembling a found family out of group of locals and fellow international expats.

Summer is bright and chaotic, full of small wins and easy laughs, as Jia's relentless optimism turns strangers into friends for life. But as the days shorten into fall and winter, the novelty wears off and life starts to get real - a rejected job offer, fraying friendships back in New York, a mother who keeps asking when she's moving back to Korea, and the ex-boyfriend who resurfaces without warning...

Underneath the comedy is a season-long question: what does it actually mean to move abroad and start over in Copenhagen? Each member of Jia's friendship group is working through their own version of that question of what it means to belong. The season builds to a finale where Jia stops performing certainty for everyone around her and, for the first time, accepts that there are no rules when it comes to belonging.

An estimated 180,000 U.S. citizens move abroad each year. Roughly 5.5 million Americans currently live outside the country.

Approximately 7.08 to 7.3 million Koreans live abroad. The Korean diaspora comprises about 4.6 million people (ethnic Koreans with foreign citizenship) and roughly 2.5 million South Korean nationals residing or studying abroad.

Who gets to decide what an expat is?

I've been asking myself some version of this question my whole life.

I was born in New Jersey. When I was little, my parents moved us to South Korea, and suddenly I couldn't understand what my own grandparents were saying to me. I didn't speak any Korean. I was enrolled in an international school where I spoke English all day and met people from all over the world, which I loved, but it also meant I grew up slightly removed from what was supposed to be my heritage, my culture, my country.

So I decided I was American. I had the second passport to prove it. My parents had American values, I was told I was too American to really fit in, and I took that and made it my identity.

Then I came to the States for boarding school, and I was the other again. A minority student at a majority-white prep school. The Korean American kids saw me as too Korean, since I'd grown up in a country that was foreign to them. And to the white students I was just Korean. Where did that leave me?

I thought I'd settled it or at least let it go by the time I finished film school at NYU. New York felt like a place where I didn't need an answer. Everyone there is from somewhere else. And then I graduated and found myself moving again, this time to Copenhagen.

It was a leap I made without knowing what was on the other side of it, and it pulled every one of those old questions right back to the surface. Standing in a new country, filling out forms that ask you to choose a category and identity for yourself, shopping in a foreign language at a grocery store. I was five years old in my grandparents' living room for the first time again.

Expat. Immigrant. Emigrant. Who decides which one you are, and what do these words actually mean to us now? They sound neutral, but they aren't. One of them implies you chose to leave. One implies you had to. In a globalizing world that keeps moving faster and closer together, these words don't do the work of bringing us with it. They’re used to sort us, to separate us, to draw lines in the sand between people who have done the exact same thing in varying contexts. You cross an ocean and someone else decides which side of the line you land on.

I've come to define myself on my own terms: my values, the things I love, the people I've met. Not my passport, not my ethnicity, not the boxes someone else checks for me. Living with all of that, sorting through it, is what pushed me to make this film. I wanted to take these words apart and look at the conflict inside them honestly, without resolving it too neatly.

This web series is also my love letter to Copenhagen, to everything it has given me, to the incredible people I've met here, to its extraordinary international community.

Love,

Skylar Kim

Showrunner/Writer/Director

The media landscape is changing. Audiences are spending more time on social platforms than on traditional television, and the creators they follow aren't waiting for studio approval to tell the kind of diverse stories audiences actually care about.

The traditional route (of a film school, festival circuit, industry gatekeepers) is expensive, slow, and excludes far more (diverse) talent than it admits. A crowdfunded webseries removes those barriers and puts resources directly in the hands of creators who are ready to make meaningful work right now. Your support becomes an opportunity.

For audiences, this is ownership. Content delivered free through social media doesn't sit behind a paywall. It lives online, built for sharing, designed to reach people who wouldn't otherwise find it. 

The question of whether independent, creator-owned content can break through or not is no longer hypothetical.

Backrooms began as a YouTube webseries that went viral on social media, leading A24 to approach its creator, Kane Parsons, about directing a feature film. The web series amassed nearly 200 million views. The film grossed $117.9 million worldwide, making Parsons the youngest filmmaker to reach number 1 at the box office.

Obsession, directed by 26-year-old Curry Barker (who built his following through social media) was shot for $750k and is tracking toward $125-150 million at the box office. 

Your support helps build an audience from the ground up and create a community online!

By donating, you'll get some great perks and the joy of helping an international, women-led team make something from scratch.

Your contributions go directly toward covering travel and housing our international cast and crew, paying for meals on set, renting additional camera and lighting equipment that we don't already own, and shooting across two very different Danish seasons: Summer AND Winter.

Supporting Copenhagen Expats means twelve episodes about belonging, found family, and starting over go online free, for anyone who's ever lived abroad somewhere.

Help bring all twelve episodes of our show to life! No donation is too small, even $8 gets you an incredible-y overpriced cup of coffee in Copenhagen!

We are planning to shoot in Denmark across two distinct seasons – late summer and winter. This isn't just a logistical choice. Denmark in August and Denmark in January feel like two entirely different countries, and we want our series to be honest about the experiences surrounding both seasons. We want to stay true to authentic experiences. 

This seasonal contrast is central to the story. Anyone who has moved abroad knows that falling in love with a place in its best season is easy. Choosing to stay through its “hardest one” is something else entirely. Shooting across both lets us tell that truth visually.

Here's how we're bringing Copenhagen Expats to life:

• September 2026 - Our first shoot. We shoot our summer episodes, while Copenhagen is still bright, long-lit, and full of people outside.
• November 2026 - Our second shoot. We return to shoot our fall and winter episodes, when the sun disappears and the city becomes a completely different place.
• Spring 2027 - We bring the series to our communities with local in-person screenings in Copenhagen, New York, and (hopefully!) Los Angeles, because a show about found family and community should be watched in a room full of people too.
• 2027 and beyond - We submit to film festivals with specific web series, episodic, and short-form categories, while we keep building our audience online.

Sharing this campaign makes a huge difference. The more people who know, the closer we get to making it happen!

Follow our journey on Seed&Spark and on Instagram: @copenhagenexpats

By supporting this campaign, you are literally making this project a reality!

Thank you, tak, 감사합니다, gracias, grazie, kiitos, danke, ممنون, cảm ơn!