Jørgen Leth

Open details →

Documentary about filmmaker and film lover Stig Björkman during the pandemic year of 2020 when he stay in touch with his friends over his laptop.

Open details →

Documentary about Danish filmmaker, sports journalist and poet Jørgen Leth who struggles after surviving a major earthquake in Haiti.

Open details →

Open details →

Jørgen Leth looks back at more than 50 years as a filmmaker in a cheerful film, whose contagious enthusiasm initiates us in his special poetry.

Open details →

Open details →

Open details →

Open details →

What are the consequences of a young person to be famous at an early age, being a public person? "Født til Filmen" is about the Danish actress Stine Bierlich's (1967 - 2007) life and career. Through interviews with herself, with her family - Ann Bierlich (mother), Asger Leth (brother), Jørgen Leth (stepfather), friends and people from the film industry it tells us about Stine's life from being a child actress to becoming a celebrated young star of the 80's. The film is a comment on today's worshipping of stars, and how fame has almost become a drug in itself. It’s as if here’s every answer to any doubt. But as Stine's story shows, reality can actually be the opposite.

Open details →

Open details →

The rules are simple in Senegalese wrestling: First man down, loses. The sport derives from ritual manhood trials and has developed into a national sport with packed stadiums and huge prizes. Today, the fight is supplemented with bare knuckle boxing but without any protection. The 22­-year-­old cattle herder Ndoff has been chosen to compete in an annual talent event in Dakar, and faces a possible breakthrough as a pro wrestler. LAAMB is the story of a sport filled with myths and extreme voodoo rituals, and a modern tale about fighting one’s way out of poverty.

Open details →

Frank is left with the responsibility for his nephew Bo on an already planned canoe trip. Frank's mate Casper is also coming along. Weighed down a with their obligation, Frank and Casper nevertheless look forward to ending the trip at Skanderborg Festival where there's plenty there for the guys, a spree of drinking and women. Not the best example to set for young Bo. And how do their partners see it all?

Open details →

The film has been ten years in the making, and over time it has grown to become what the director himself has called an artistic testament. It is simultaneously his most personal and most provocative film. A film about growing older, about losing, about the special moments one remembers, and about the director's own circling around the essence of eroticism.

Open details →

Krzysztof Komeda was a jazz pianist and film composer. With compositions like the lullaby for Rosemary's Baby (1968) by Roman Polanski, Komeda succeeded in writing his own chapter in the history of soundtracks. This documentary follows the life story of the composer by the means of his melodic sounds. It is a reflection on his soundtracks, which changed the common film scores forever. It is a contemporary document about the attitude to life in a time of social, political and cultural change after war, about work and exodus of Polish artists in the 50s and 60s. A story about how film music is created and how it affects people. Directors who worked with Komeda and who are also friends talk about him: Roman Polanski, Jerzy Skolimowski, Henning Carlsen and Andrzej Wajda. His wife, Zofia Komeda, and his sister, Irena Orlowska, recollect him.

Open details →

A documentary and series of interviews about the ABCinema movement/production group.

Open details →

The artistically streaked brothers James and Adam Price learned early on to LOVE food and both are right at home in the kitchen. In this series they alternate between working together and competing against each other as they take on each episode's theme of food. Some dishes are done the old fashioned way, some get a twist but all is done in a humorous atmosphere of good-natured bantering, teasing and story telling.

Open details →

When the media storm flared up in the wake of Jørgen Leth's memoir "The Imperfect Man" in 2005, it was mainly due to the passage about Leth's erotic relationship with the chef's young daughter. While the storm was still raging, friend and journalist Jørgen Flindt Pedersen contacted Jørgen Leth, who had been hiding from the public, to hear his reaction. "The price of sensuality" follows Leth for a year after its publication, in quiet moments outside the limelight, until the farewell the following late summer, when Leth goes home to Haiti.

Open details →

A documentary about the interaction of skateboarding and public space. Shot in 2006 on 16mm Film and Mini-DV as part of the Fuel TV experiment.

Open details →

A documentary short about the director's home town of Aarhus, Denmark.

Open details →

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.

Open details →

Mona, a single girl in her thirties, leads a life filled with adventure and romance. In her dreams that is. But an ordinary visit to the bank is about to make her real life as exciting as her imagination, and moreover, during this encounter she is introduced to the man of her dreams in a way she never dreamt of.

Open details →

Open details →

In the first of three programmes, hosts Ronnie and Ronnie Michael Wikke and Steen Rasmussen restore viewers' zest for life and faith in life after a tough evening in front of the screen.

Open details →

As a visual narrative it is reminiscent of a pile of postcards from a journey, which indeed is what the film is. It consists of a series of lengthy shots of a tableau nature, each appearing to be a more or less random cross section of American reality, but which in total invoke a highly emblematic picture of the USA.

Open details →

Jørgen Leth can squeeze poetry from a stone and wit from dust, and he can find love where the milk of human kindness runs dry. In a series of tableaux of Life in Denmark, he carries absurdism to a happy extreme. To act out his minuscule non-dramas, he uses a motley crew of professional actors like Ghita Nørby and Claus Nissen, writer Dan Turéll plus a snake charmer, a bicycle racer and a circus queen.

Open details →

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.

Open details →

Music for Black Pigeons is the first collaboration between Jørgen Leth and Andreas Koefoed. The film poses existential questions to influential jazz players such as Bill Frisell, Lee Konitz, Midori Takada and many others: How does it feel to play, and what does it mean to listen? What is it like to be a human being and spending your whole life trying to express something through sounds? The characters wake up, rehearse, record, perform and talk about music. In some moments they are on the edge, the edge of existence, constantly challenging themselves. They listen. They devote themselves to finding a space to create a connection to something bigger than themselves. Something that will outlast all of us.

Open details →

The film has been ten years in the making, and over time it has grown to become what the director himself has called an artistic testament. It is simultaneously his most personal and most provocative film. A film about growing older, about losing, about the special moments one remembers, and about the director's own circling around the essence of eroticism.

Open details →

A documentary short about the director's home town of Aarhus, Denmark.

Open details →

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.

Open details →

A look at post-9/11 America by the Danish documentarian.

Open details →

During a period of 20 years Jørgen Leth portrays Haitian painters and their wonderful native artform. They are dreamers, mystics, fantasts and storytellers. Haiti is a country in which a strong sense of historical destiny confronts the human condition, and where spiritual forces play an active part in everyday life.

Open details →

With films like Det perfekte menneske and Det gode og det onde in mind the consistent black and white portrait film Jeg er levende gives the impression that Søren Ulrik Thomsen has been invited into Leth's filmic universe, which conversely allows room for the poet's words. Thomsen gives an account of brief memories of childhood in a deliberately "staged" fashion, but more particularly of his experience of writing and on the art of reading aloud, and likewise describing poetry in general as a balance between emotion and cognition.

Open details →

Writer and cineast Jørgen Leth is the fascinated observer of a country where reality often seems surreal and resembles fiction. Haïti’s history is written in blood. Voodoo plays an important role in politics. Death and horror are part of Haïti’s everyday life. Over five years Leth and his small crew witnessed dramatic events, but he also captured moments of sensuality and beauty in his epic and very personal documentary.

Open details →

Traberg, like Udenrigskorrespondenten, is an experiment in fiction consisting of placing a character or a fictional sketch into a set of surroundings and seeing what happens. Moreover, for most of the film the surroundings are the same, namely the chaotic reality of Haiti. Ebbe Traberg plays Traberg, a mystical character who cannot be explained psychologically and whose seemingly covert activities care only hinted at in pictures.

Open details →

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.

Open details →

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.

Open details →

In 1984 Jørgen Leth, cinematographer Dan Holmberg and sound recordist Niels Torp travelled some 6,000 kilometres by train through China. The result is a very calm, beautifully perceived travelogue borne by unprejudiced curiosity and observational ability.

Open details →

An insight into the work by composer and pianist Herman D. Koppel with the American Cantilena Quartet before the first performance of his piano quartet 'opus 114' in 1986.

Open details →

A documentary view of the Basque ball-game in which a small hard leather ball is hit against a wall. The film gives an impression of the game itself and of those who play it, not only the star performers (and the myths that surround them), but also those who just play in the streets and alleyways. The film sees the game it its cultural context and conveys the emotions and stories that are peculiar to the Basque country.

Open details →

Udenrigskorrespondenten was Leth's first feature but must be regarded as an experiment in fiction rather than an action film in the usual sense. Alex Hansen (Henning Jensen) is a peripatetic correspondent and at the start of the film on an assignment in civil-war-ravaged El Salvador.

Open details →

Step on Silence was made from raw material from Peter Martins - en danser but unlike the traditional way the Martins film communicates its material in this case we have a film that with its slightly dusty, scratchy appearance makes room for all the shots originally discarded for technical or narrative reasons.

Open details →

Portraying Ayub Kalule, the boxer from Uganda who was "the most famous immigrant in Denmark" in the late 1970s.

Open details →

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.

Open details →

A chronology of the 1976 Paris-Roubaix bicycle race from the perspective of participants, organizers and spectators.

Open details →

Jørgen Leth can squeeze poetry from a stone and wit from dust, and he can find love where the milk of human kindness runs dry. In a series of tableaux of Life in Denmark, he carries absurdism to a happy extreme. To act out his minuscule non-dramas, he uses a motley crew of professional actors like Ghita Nørby and Claus Nissen, writer Dan Turéll plus a snake charmer, a bicycle racer and a circus queen.

Open details →

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."

Open details →

The Impossible Hour is a concentrated study of Ole Ritter's attempt in Mexico City in 1974 to set a new record for the hour - described in the film as "the noblest, most difficult record that can be set on a bicycle". A brief retrospective in black and white sets the historical framework, with shots of Ritter and Eddy Merckx' successful record attempts in 1968 and 1972 respectively, and a few words about former record holders such as Fausto Coppi.The film follows Ritter's three record attempts chronologically, which, accompanied by a Mexican marching band on the bandstand, all fail.

Open details →

Klaus Rifbjerg is a portrait that has the author talking about his work in a series of tableaux.

Open details →

With a slow introductory zoom onto Leth in a TV studio and a corresponding zoom out at the end Eddy Merckx in the Vicinity of a Cup of Coffee may be structured in the classical style but an extremely unusual TV production is involved: in the studio Leth reads from his poetry while a subtitle - like in Life in Denmark - pedantically but ambiguously presents observations and describes what is going on.

Open details →

The intention of the film is to give an impression of what small exotic Denmark looks like, what the strange Danes look like and how they are. Nearly 100 Danes are presented in the film, amongst them a racing cyclist, a Minister of Finance, a popular actor and 13 unmarried women from a provincial town. "There is too much fogginess and rain and melancholy in most of the pictures of Denmark," says Jørgen Leth. "But not in my film. I would like to show you some authentic, clear and beautiful pictures from this strange country."

Open details →

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.

Open details →

The film may be viewed as a study of the nature of the medium and more specifically of the phenomena of framing, movement, and synchronicity of sound and picture.

Open details →

Portraying the four seasons of the nature in the famous Danish garden Dyrehaven.

Open details →

The ABCinema group dispatched Jørgen Leth to make the arrangements with Prime Minister Jens Otto Krag, who good-naturedly put himself at their disposal. Relaxing on a bench in the garden of Copenhagen's Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Krag is scrutinised by camera-wielding collective members almost like a model in a life-drawing class. Every possible angle, distance and framing is tried. The result is an image of the prime minister that is both fragmented and multi-facetted, describing his visual appearance as a man and an icon. At the same time, the ABCinema members film each other filming Krag, which gives the film a highly self-reflective character. Like "The Deer Garden," this is a film about a film being filmed. A showdown with the documentary portrait genre, "Jens Otto Krag" is devised according to the principle of keeping the material alive by not editing it but randomly piecing it together. (DFI)

Open details →

Jørgen Leth's experimental take on Ophelia's madness scene in Shakespeare's Hamlet.

Open details →

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.

Open details →

Short film about hippie life in Nepal.

Open details →