Copenhagen has always been a city of stories, but few storytellers have reshaped its cinematic identity as provocatively as Lars von Trier. The Danish director, born in 1956 in Kongens Lyngby just north of the capital, turned the city’s streets, institutions, and psychological undercurrents into a recurring character in his work. From the haunted corridors of Rigshospitalet in The Kingdom to the dogme-defined urban realism of The Idiots, von Trier’s Copenhagen is neither postcard-perfect nor entirely real – it is a landscape filtered through anxiety, dark humour, and a relentless pursuit of emotional truth.
What makes von Trier’s relationship with Copenhagen distinctive is its materiality. He did not merely film the city; he built institutions within it, codified a movement from it, and ultimately made it inseparable from the question of what European cinema could become.
The Formative Years: Copenhagen’s Film Schools
Von Trier’s early years in Copenhagen were shaped by two formative experiences: studying film science at the University of Copenhagen from 1976 to 1979, and then attending the National Film School of Denmark, where he trained as a director between 1979 and 1982. The Danish Film School, located on Copenhagen’s harbour, was not merely an educational institution; it was a crucible for a generation of filmmakers who would go on to challenge European cinema’s conventions.
His graduation film, Befrielsesbilleder (Images of a Liberation, 1982), already hinted at his fascination with blending documentary textures with fictional narratives – a tension that would define his career. Earlier student works such as Nocturne (1981) had won prizes at the Munich International Festival of Film Schools, establishing von Trier as a talent of singular visual ambition before he had completed his formal education.
The school has since produced directors like Nicolas Winding Refn, Susanne Bier, and Thomas Vinterberg, all of whom built on foundations that von Trier helped lay during his student years in the late 1970s.
Zentropa and Filmbyen: Building Copenhagen’s Film Infrastructure
By the time von Trier co-founded Zentropa Entertainments in 1992 with producer Peter Aalbæk Jensen, he had established himself as a director of singular vision. Zentropa, named after the fictional railway company in his 1991 film Europa, became one of Europe’s most prolific production companies. With over 275 titles in its catalogue and two Academy Awards for Best International Feature Film, the company’s influence on Danish cinema is immeasurable.
But it was the creation of Filmbyen – Film City – that truly embedded von Trier’s aesthetic into Copenhagen’s physical fabric. Located eight kilometres from Copenhagen’s centre in Hvidovre, Filmbyen is a former military base transformed into a sprawling film studio complex. Founded in 1997, it houses production offices, sound stages, and post-production facilities for Zentropa and numerous other companies.
The complex has a deliberately unpolished character; Aalbæk Jensen once remarked that they had “made it as shitty as possible” to keep expectations low and creativity high. When Catherine Deneuve filmed Dancer in the Dark (2000) there, she queued for the toilets alongside everyone else. This was not merely frugality – it was ideology. By keeping costs low and fostering a communal, almost bohemian atmosphere, von Trier and his collaborators created a space where experimentation thrived.
Dogme 95: Copenhagen’s Anti-Hollywood Manifesto
The Dogme 95 movement, which von Trier co-founded with Thomas Vinterberg in 1995, was conceived in this environment. The Dogme manifesto, announced at a Paris conference on 13 March 1995, called for a return to story, acting, and theme, rejecting elaborate special effects and post-production manipulation. Von Trier famously showered the audience with 500 red pamphlets outlining the “Vows of Chastity” – ten rules that would govern how Dogme films were made.
The rules were radical but emerged from a distinctly Copenhagen sensibility: a pragmatic, anti-elitist approach to art-making. Handheld cameras only. Natural light. No external props or sets. No superficial action. The director must not be credited. These constraints were not merely aesthetic choices; they were economic and philosophical ones. In a city where the welfare state had cultivated a culture of egalitarianism, Dogme 95 proposed that cinema could be made by anyone, anywhere, with minimal resources.
By 2005, when the original Dogme collective officially disbanded, 212 feature films had been certified under its rules. Thomas Vinterberg’s The Celebration (Festen, 1998), the first officially certified Dogme film, won the Jury Prize at Cannes. Von Trier’s own The Idiots (Idioterne, 1998) divided critics but cemented the movement’s reputation as a genuine challenge to cinematic convention. The Guardian described Dogme 95 as a movement that “reinvented Denmark,” claiming it “didn’t just shake up cinema – it inspired Danes to make the world’s best TV, buildings and food.”
The Kingdom: Copenhagen’s Hospital of Horrors
If Filmbyen represents von Trier’s impact on Copenhagen’s infrastructure, The Kingdom (Riget, 1994) is his most direct engagement with the city’s institutional life. The miniseries, co-directed with Morten Arnfred, is set in Rigshospitalet, Denmark’s largest public hospital. Von Trier secured permission to shoot in the real hospital, blending ghostly apparitions and the presence of Satan with a comic medical soap opera. The result was a work of hallucinatory originality, often compared to David Lynch’s Twin Peaks.
The choice of Rigshospitalet was significant. The hospital is a Copenhagen landmark, a symbol of the Danish welfare state’s ambition and its inherent contradictions. Von Trier exploited these tensions, portraying the institution as a place where bureaucratic inertia, professional rivalries, and supernatural forces collide. The series became a cultural phenomenon in Denmark, spawning two sequels – the second in 1997 and the third, The Kingdom: Exodus, in 2022.
That third and final instalment carried particular poignancy. Von Trier, having publicly disclosed his Parkinson’s diagnosis in August 2022, acknowledged that his condition had affected his ability to direct. “That means that I had not lived up to the way I wanted to be as a director, because I was ill,” he told Variety at the Venice Film Festival.
The Idiots: Dogme on the Streets
If The Kingdom used Copenhagen’s institutions as its stage, The Idiots (Idioterne, 1998) took the Dogme aesthetic to the city’s streets and suburbs. The film follows a group of young people who adopt “spastic” behaviour in public as a form of rebellion against social norms. Shot entirely with a Sony DCR-VX1000 digital camera – operated by von Trier himself – the film captures Copenhagen in a way few conventional films had done before.
The film’s Copenhagen is not the tourist’s Copenhagen. There are no canal boats or Tivoli Gardens; instead, von Trier shows us suburban housing estates, communal dining rooms, and the kind of anonymous urban spaces where social conformity is most palpably felt. The group’s excursions into the city – disturbing dinner parties, provoking strangers – become a critique of Danish society’s emphasis on hygge and social cohesion.
The production also highlighted the collaborative, low-budget ethos that Zentropa and Filmbyen had fostered. The script was written in just four days, the crew was minimal, and the digital format allowed for a flexibility that traditional film stock could not.
Breaking Darkness: Von Trier as Visual Artist
In early 2025, Nikolaj Kunsthal – a dynamic art space housed in a former church in central Copenhagen – staged Breaking Darkness, a major exhibition running from 8 February to 27 July 2025 that translated von Trier’s cinematic universe into immersive installation art. The exhibition consisted of five site-specific installations representing films created between 1991 and 2011.
Curator Astrid Bay described the project as a “total installation” dissolving the boundaries between visual art and film. Author Sofie Riise Nors contributed a feminist perspective, while von Trier – though not directly involved – gave his formal blessing: “I, Lars von Trier, hereby give the exhibition my blessing.”
The exhibition acknowledged the controversies that have shadowed von Trier’s career, including his 2011 Cannes press conference and the allegations made by Björk during the #MeToo movement. Rather than shying away, it positioned itself as a space for dialogue about art, power, and the difficulty of separating creative work from its creator.
Dogma 25: Von Trier’s Legacy Reborn
Perhaps the most significant evidence of von Trier’s continuing influence came in May 2025, when five filmmakers launched Dogma 25 at the Cannes Film Festival – thirty years after the original manifesto. The collective, founded in Copenhagen in the spring of 2025, consists of directors May el-Toukhy, Milad Alami, Annika Berg, Isabella Eklöf, and Jesper Just.
Their manifesto explicitly invokes von Trier and Vinterberg: “We celebrate DOGMA 95, the filmmakers who came before us, and those who will come after. We stand together to defend artistic freedom as a shield against pointlessness and powerlessness. DOGMA 25 is a rescue mission and a cultural uprising.” The new movement was facilitated by Zentropa, with managing directors Louise Vesth and Sisse Graum Jørgensen overseeing its financing.
By October 2025, the first Dogma 25 film – Isabella Eklöf’s Mr. Nawashi – had begun shooting at Filmbyen, with von Trier’s “Vows of Chastity” reinterpreted for a new generation.
Von Trier’s Final Chapter
In November 2025, at the 26th Festival del Cinema Europeo in Lecce, Zentropa producer Louise Vesth confirmed that von Trier is developing After, described as his “final film.” The director, now 69, was described as being “in very good spirits” despite his Parkinson’s diagnosis and his residence part-time at a care facility. “He no longer works full days as he used to, but I can say with certainty that it is a project in continuous evolution,” Vesth explained.
The film, which has received funding from the Danish Film Institute, will tackle “death and life after death.” Stellan Skarsgård has been cast in the lead. Beyond After, Vesth revealed an even more ambitious project: a 100-episode series blending archive material with intimate reflections, designed to map von Trier’s creative terrain in its entirety.
Whether or not these projects reach completion, von Trier’s impact on Copenhagen is already secured. Through Zentropa, Filmbyen, the Dogme movement, and now the Dogma 25 revival, he created not merely a body of work but an entire ecosystem for filmmaking that continues to generate new talent, new ideas, and new challenges to the conventions of the medium.
