It has been revealed that Denmark's reigning monarch, Queen Margrethe II, will design the sets for a planned Netflix film based on a novel by Karen Blixen.

Ehrengard will be directed by Bille August, the experienced Danish director of Pelle the Conqueror (which won both the Palme d'Or and the Oscar for the best foreign-language picture in 1988) and The Best Intentions (which won August a second Palme d'Or).

Margrethe, who ascended to the Danish throne in 1972 and is the commander-in-chief of the country's armed forces, has also had a long career as an artist, drawing illustrations for Danish editions of Lord of the Rings and participating in exhibitions at galleries such as the Arken Museum of Modern Art in Ishoj, near Copenhagen. She also worked as a production designer for The Wild Swans, a 2009 fantasy fairy tale, and a 2000 short film adaption of Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen.

“Karen Blixen's stories have always fascinated me, with their aesthetic tales, their imagination, and there, to me, image-creating worlds – and I'm very happy to be part of this project,” Margrethe said in a statement. In creating the decoupages and costumes, I sought to capture Blixen's wonderful cosmos, and I'm excited to see the story of Ehrengard come to life in this film.”

August said, "For the occasion, the Queen has created the most fantastic decoupages, which will be the dominant feature of the film's overall scenographic expression." Our starting point for the film is ‘fantastic' (in the most literal sense); we want to employ humor and elegance to create a devil-may-care, burlesque, wonderful, and independent visual universe.”