Lars von Trier (the "von" was adopted during his stay at the Danish Film School) was born in Copenhagen, Denmark in April 1956. He graduated from the Danish Film School in 1983 with his short film "Images of a relief" ("Befrielsesbilleder") which won the Best Film award at the Munich Film Festival the following year.

He had his real breakthrough with the Forbrydelsens element (1984) (Element of Crime), an expressionistic, yellow-tinted and post-modern film with a psychological theme, for which he won the Technical Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. The Element of Crime was follow by the fiasco "Epedemic" in 1987, however Lars von Trier made a comeback with his 1991 film Europa (1991) (US title: "Zentropa"), which won him the Jury Prize as well as the Technical Grand Prize and Best Artistic Contribution at the Cannes Film Festival. The film, taking place in post-war Germany, is a great example of a post- apocalyptical film, with a wired hypnotic architecture and a centralisation on the human morale, responsibility and love. However, it is probably his later movies which Lars von Trier is going to be remembered for. His Breaking the Waves (1996), for which he won the Jury Prize at Cannes, was the director's first film (in a trilogy) that centered on the female sex. Breaking the Waves is perhaps one of the worlds most emotional motion pictures, leaving not an eye dry when it ends, and the viewer realizes that love, indeed, is the greatest power.

With Dancer in the Dark (2000), Lars von Trier made a melodrama about an east European woman, who sacrifices everything, literally, to save her son from getting the same eye-illness as she herself suffers from, and thereby going blind. The film was one of the first motion pictures in the world to be filmed with entirely digital equipment. Icelandic singer- superstar Björk, who also made all the music, starred as Selma, the principal character. Dancer in the Dark won the 2000 Palm D'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

If not for his movies, Lars von Trier is going to be remembered for his TV soap "The Kingdom" ("Riget") from 1994; a soap in which Lars von Trier is blending his own cinematic style with a David Lynch-like surrealistic story about ghosts, god and satan. It was "The Kingdom" which made Lars von Trier a household name in Denmark. Together with producer Peter Ålbæk Jensen, Lars von Trier owns Zentropa Enterprizes, which produces Lars von Triers fims, as well as many others.

IMDb Mini Biography By: Nikolaj Hawaleschka Stenberg