Starting at 20:00
Europe's leading director Lars von Trier is one of the founders of the Danish manifesto Dogma 95. Here, however, he departs from those rules to create a stylised genre of music and dance film. A number of countries, such as Denmark, France, Sweden, Italy, Germany, Norway and Finland, participated in the expensive European project. The story, however, is set in the United States in the mid-1960s. The heroine is a peculiar Czechoslovak emigrant, Selma Ježková, who is threatened with early blindness. She herself has emigrated to the States to arrange eye surgery for her son, who has a hereditary disease. Selma is surrounded by good people, yet she remains alone in her fate. She overcomes her difficulties thanks mainly to her passion for music. She rehearses the musical With the Sound of Music with amateurs, and often translates the musical numbers in her imagination into the real environment in which she moves. The dominating feature of the film, which like Breaking the Waves deals with the theme of self-sacrifice, remains the performance of the Icelandic singer Björk, who here is completely identified with her exceptional role without further ambitions for a film career. The documentary style of shooting with a handheld digital camera then forms a strange and often discussed contrast to the melodrama and musical genre. Admired by some, rejected by others, the film took home both top prizes at Cannes - the Palme d'Or, plus an acting award for Björk.
Dancer in the Dark
Crime / Drama / Musical
Denmark / Germany / Netherlands / USA / Sweden, 2000, 140 min
Directed by Lars von Trier
Czech subtitles
