Dan Holmberg

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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.

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The mysteries of the balls in Basque Pelota: each ball is a unique creation with which the players have a special relationship.

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A Danish film essay about human evil and the motivations of mass murderers in war situations. A number of executioners divulge their bloody tales.

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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A large family in London's East End is celebrating a birthday party. Children and grandchildren from this extensive family have come to the party from all over England. At the party the family members talk about hope and dreams for their children. The past and present lives of various relatives are compared with each other, while fragments from radio-programmes from the fourties and the fifties draw an emotional and historical line. Set against this archive material are fierce images of modern day family life in urban England in the year 1993. This makes the film a collage of dreams, memories and images of present-day life.

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A stil-life of marvellous Danish footballer Michael Laudrups performance on the Barcelona dreamteam 1989-94.

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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.

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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.

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The World is Watching is a political film about the moral issues surrounding news gathering and newsmaking in the electronic age. Who decides what constitutes the news? How do they decide? And what about the men and women who report from the field. Are foreign correspondents allowed to tell all that they see? The film examines these complex issues by focusing on several international journalists in Nicaragua as they cover the negotiations surrounding the Arias Peace Plan in November 1987. With unprecedented access to the inner workings of ABC News, what follows is a unique portrait of a news crew in the field, as it interacts with the editorial process in the newsroom in New York City.

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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.

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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.

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A personal essay on the play of children and grown-ups all over the world. The director has shot the film in different countries and cultures: Bali, Brazil, China, Denmark, UK, Haiti, Spain and the USA.

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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.

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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.

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At danse Bournonville is a portrait of the Bournonville tradition at the Royal Danish ballet that has survived for 150 years on the basis of a few notes and the memories of the dancers and is the basis of the special nature and global reputation the company enjoys. The film was created in continuation of, and drawing on, Leth and Holmberg's experience in making Peter Martins - en danser.

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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.

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Moki and Don Cherry met in the mid-1960s and soon began collaborating closely. They made happenings, music, art, posters, and record sleeves; they performed together, organized workshops, and toured. The film merges the different worlds they lived in – countryside and city life, and the various disciplines that were interwoven in their artistic practices.

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

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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."

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