The owner of an Information Technology firm wants to sell his business for profit. The trouble is that when he started his firm he invented a nonexistent company president to hide behind when unpopular steps needed to be taken. When potential purchasers insist on negotiating with the "Boss" face to face the owner has to hire a failed actor to play the part.

Just after World War II, an American takes a railway job in Germany, but finds his position politically sensitive with various people trying to use him.

In 1967, experimental filmmaker Jorgen Leth created a striking short film, The Perfect Human, starring a man and women sitting in a box while a narrator poses questions about their relationship and humanity. Years later, Danish director Lars von Trier made a deal with Leth to remake his film five times, each under a different set of circumstances and with von Trier's strictly prescribed rules. As Leth completes each challenge, von Trier creates increasingly further elaborate stipulations.

Guided by Liv Ullmann and with commentaries from a number of prominent filmmakers for whom Bergman is and remains an important influence - such as Woody Allen, Olivier Assayas, Bernardo Bertolucci, Arnaud Desplechin, John Sayles, Martin Scorsese and Lars von Trier, the film provides a vivid portrait of the artist who in each new project found a challenge for himself and for the people he worked with - both actors and colleagues behind the camera.

A director and screenwriter pen a script and, in the process, blur the line between fiction and reality.

Lars von Trier was interviewed by Christian Lund at his home outside Copenhagen in November 2020.

Erik Nietzsche is an intelligent but in many ways inexperienced shy young man who is convinced that he wants to be a film director. In the late 1970s, Erik is accepted by the Danish National Film School where he enters a world of angry and unhelpful tutors, weird fellow students and unwritten rules. In this both exhilarating and angst-provoking period for him, Erik feels increasingly like a foreigner in the film industry. Frequently, he is merely an observer of the absurdities that surround him. He encounters trade union disputes, falls in love and experiences self-assured empowered women who refuse to make a commitment. The film is a drama full of comedy - a sharp portrait of a conceited but entertaining world of film which we suspect our dogged young director will eventually conquer with his vision.

A portrait of Denmark's most acclaimed and controversial director, Lars von Trier. A meeting with von Trier on a private level as well as with his film universe. Filmmaker Stig Björkman follow von Trier during a period of more than two years, meet him at work, at home and at leisure. Written by Fredrik Klasson

Although at first sight this might look like a simple ‘making of DANCER IN THE DARK’, the later developments in the film reveal the whole drama of Lars von Trier’s inner life during the shooting process. All his doubts and insecurities in collaborating with the crew and actors - especially actresses - are exposed. The biggest drama started when Björk walked off the set. Nobody knew whether she would be back or not. Admitting that he feels threatened by women, who can ‘make him feel embarrassed’, the director gives this documentary the nature of a personal diary. When he discusses the importance, purpose and beauty of the use of a hundred cameras in a certain sequence or the meaning of the Dogma 95 rules, the audience is witnessing the process of the artist’s search. Is the pain that the director went through during the shooting really visible in the final result, as Lars von Trier claims in this film? (from: http://www.idfa.nl/)

The most suffocating is the awareness that nothing is happening. All the veins are drying without the blood running through them. I came to Barão Geraldo because things happen here. Here people love as much as dolls hang themselves and chicken are slaughtered to death. Would I still hang dolls and burn memories in the next 18 years? It astonishes me how less and less I do not care for things that are not my extension. Being my own destruction is the only way. Intimacy is a farewell. All I see is a lot water and all the colors are not enough. All forms of comunication are not enough for a lot of water.