John's eldest daughter Eva (Jannie Faurschou, star of Danish comedy hit The One and Only), has lived her life according to the misguided belief that she is a misunderstood artist without ever really putting herself to the test. Son Tom (Henrik Prip) is a successful workaholic who has long treated his wife, Lisbeth (Julie Wieth), as part of the furniture. And youngest daughter Marianne (Maria Würgler Rich) still almost lives at home - 'almost' because she has a separate flat (paid for by her parents) next door but comes round every night for dinner - and longs for a boyfriend.

As the film progresses, John and Marianne are thrown together by loneliness; Søren's wife, Hanne (Karen-Lise Mynster), tells him she's in love with someone else; Lisbeth kicks Tom out… and that's just for starters.

It is, says Tardini, a film about family. "Family is not something you choose," he points out. "It's something you just get. You'd never choose those kind of people as your friends."

And Minor Mishaps gets in close to the family's affairs in a straightforward and simple way. "It is not a Dogme film," notes Tardini, in response to the inevitable query about any Danish film these days, "but I think Dogme is the best thing that has happened to Danish film in the 30 years that I have been producing. It means you don't have to worry about all the cranes and the make-up: you can just go directly to the point of the story - and to the actor."

All of the above seems to recall the work of Mike Leigh, and Tardini is happy to accept the comparison. "We developed it in the same way that Mike Leigh does, with lots of improvisation," he says. "But the difference with us is that we end up with a final script: there's no improvisation during shooting."

Having once been picked up sternly on just this point by Leigh himself, I point out to Tardini that Leigh also insists on a finished script, with improvisation being part of the character-development process, not the finished film. "Then we are exactly like Mike Leigh," he says happily.

Minor Mishaps marks the feature debut of Danish Film School graduate Annette K Olesen, who has been involved in the project since almost the very start, "What happened is this," says Tardini. "One day, nearly two years ago, a couple of actors came to me and asked me to develop a project. I said, 'I have to find a director, because I never develop projects without one'. If you do, you end up with something that is going to be 'developed' all over again, because every director wants to put their stamp on a film!"

Jesper Christensen as Søren and Karen Mynster as Hanne.

Olesen was chosen on the basis of her graduation film, which had picked up several festival prizes, and a few subsequent short films. But even with her on board, the process remained slow, and Minor Mishaps was not shot until the summer of 2001.

"It's always difficult to finance a film," says Tardini, who finally persuaded Danish television to come onboard after Italian for Beginners had begun its international career by telling them: "If you want Lone Scherfig's next film, you have to have this one as well!"

Olesen, for her part, enthusiastically adopted the 'Mike Leigh approach'. "The method that we used is based on a radical exploitation of the actors' resources," she says. "Instead of writing a story once and for all, a certain group of actors was chosen. They were asked to introduce the director and the writer [Kim Fupz Aakeson] to three-to-five 'characters' each - someone the actor knows or has known at one point in their lives.

"When all the actors had introduced their character, the director and the writer chose one single character per actor. At the same time, they also determined the chosen characters' role. The possibilities are endless: the only requirement is that it has to be right for the character in question."

Rehearsals then make use of improvisation, first with one actor/character, then with several at once. Gradually, the character stops being the person the actor was inspired by and develops his or her own authenticity.

"Each improvisation leads to one or more improvisations," continues Olesen. "In the beginning, they are chosen by intuition and curiosity. But, later on, they are chosen in a more directed way. Later still, the improvisations start going in one direction only. That's what creates the story, exactly like in real-life encounters between people.

"Finally, the improvisations stop. From that point, the process is like any other film production: the writer and the director go home and write a script with lines, and this script is the basis of the film that will be shot."

Shooting on Minor Mishaps took seven weeks, some of it in the studio, some of it on location, using two cameras throughout: "That's the only way we could do it so fast," says Tardini, who sums up his role - and just possibly the key to Zentropa's extraordinary success over the past four or five years - as follows: "My job is to make some creative space. They show me what they have, we talk about it, then I go out again. They work some more. I come back, we talk, I go out again…"

Also a little like life, you might say.