The Five Obstructions
Lars von Trier challenges his mentor, filmmaker Jørgen Leth, to remake Leth’s 1967 short film The Perfect Human five times, each with a different set of bizarre and challenging rules.
Lars von Trier
Jørgen Leth
Casts & Crew
Claus Nissen
Lars von Trier
Majken Algren Nielsen
Jacqueline Arenal
Daniel Hernandez Rodriguez
Alexandra Vandernoot
Patrick Bauchau
Anders Hove
Pascal Perez
Meschell Perez
Marie Dejaer
Bent Christensen
Stina Ekblad
Jan Nowicki
Charlotte Sieling
Bob Sabiston
Jørgen Leth
Also Directed by Lars von Trier
Two sisters find their already strained relationship challenged as a mysterious new planet threatens to collide with Earth.
Four people plan to rob a bank on new years eve, where no one will notice because of the celebration.
The series is set in the neurosurgical ward of Copenhagen's Rigshospitalet, the city and country's main hospital, nicknamed "Riget". "Riget" means "the realm" or "the kingdom" and leads one to think of "dødsriget", the realm of the dead.
A program of short films from some of the cinema's greatest diectors. Curated by Emir Kusturica and Stephen Frears. - George Lucas "1.42.08 to Qualify" (1966) - Ridley Scott "A Boy and a Bicycle" (1965) - Robert Zemeckis "The Lift" (1972) - Tony Scott "One of the Missing" (1969) - Emir Kusturica "Guernica" (1978) - Luc Besson "L'avant dernier" (1981) - Lars von Trier "Nocturne" (1980) - Terry Gilliam "Storytime" (1968) - Paul Verhoeven "A Lizzard Too Much" (1960) - Roman Polanski "Le gros et le maigre" (1960) - Jane Campion "Peel" (1982) - Stephen Frears "The Burning" (1967)
Based on the sadomasochistic novel by Dominique Aury, "Story of O", tells the story of a voluntary female submission.
The earliest recognized film by Lars Trier (made in his youth before he adopted the "von") is this stop motion cartoon, Turen til Squach land… En Super Pølse film (Trip to Squash Land… A Super Sausage film).
A series of ten black and white shorts.
A collection of short films by 16 European directors.
A man named Seligman finds a fainted wounded woman in an alley and he brings her home. She tells him that her name is Joe and that she is nymphomaniac. Joe tells her life and sexual experiences with hundreds of men since she was a young teenager while Seligman tells about his hobbies, such as fly fishing, reading about Fibonacci numbers or listening to organ music.
In a small and conservative Scottish village, a woman's paralytic husband convinces her to have extramarital intercourse so she can tell him about it and give him a reason for living.
Also Directed by Jørgen Leth
A short sequence through the tropics.
A documentary about the Danish artist John Kørner.
An elegant and humorous film—in the guise of a serious anthropological treatise—spotlights "The Perfect Human," a model of the modern Dane created by our wishful thinking.
The images from the Tour de France in the television production Eddy Merckx in the Vincinity of a Cup of Coffee may be seen as a small sketch for the fully unfurled epic cycling drama Stars and Watercarriers. The film follows the 1973 Giro d'Italia and in his commentary Leth explains the fascination exerted by the great cycle races: "The most beautiful, most pathetic images cycling can give us involve extreme performances in classic terrain."
Poet-filmmaker Jørgen Leth taps his own earliest inspirational veins by free-floating through a camera/microscope-enhanced set of poems with love as their first and final subject. For example, how a tropical island woman prepares for a meeting with her lover. The film was shot partly in the South Pacific with more than a nod to social anthropoliogist B. Malinowski's historical work The Sexual Life of Savages.
Jørgen Leth's personal, pleasurable distillation of Danish literature covers seven poets alive at the time of production and twenty classical poets. A handful of actors share readings of the classical texts in semi close ups against a dark background; the living poets read their own works.
A late 1970s look at Danish ballet star Peter Martins's art and an assessment of what makes him unique and highly lauded on the international stage of ballet.
The Search is the ultimate happening film created by a group of ABCinema members during a camp on the Juttish heath. The film consists of loosely composed sequences. The landscape is the setting for a series of peculiar occurrences in which individual members were free to realize personal ideas, fantasies and themes: a man runs across the heath, shouting, a Molotov cocktail flares on a beach, a man repeatedly falls over, an angel-like woman makes a solitary procession, a burning pine, a man breaking a tree with a shovel, etc.
Anthology of six experimental films. 1) Allan de Waal: Investigation of an abandoned hippie house. 2) Bjørn Nørgaard and Lene Adler Petersen: The female Christ. Five subsections. a) The female Christ crucified by Roskilde Fjord. b) The female Christ on the Stock Exchange. c) The female Christ exposes herself in front of a cross in a backyard in Nørrebro. d) Female body with breasts and shot bare on a lawn. e) Exhibition of Bjørn Nørgaard's "fucking machines". The female Christ is hung naked in it and eventually has intercourse with Nørgaard. 3) Per Kirkeby: The primitive life in the forest. 4) Jørgen Leth: Interview with a hippie girl. 5) Vagn Lundbye: Paraphrase of spaghetti western. 6) Peter Louis-Jensen: Revolver section of picture and sound noise.
Portraying the four seasons of the nature in the famous Danish garden Dyrehaven.