Movies: Jørgen Leth

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, ab...

Lars von Trier challenges his mentor, filmmaker Jørgen Leth, to remake Leth’s 1967 short film The Perfect Human five times, each with a different set of bizarre and challenging rules....

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....

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 Fes...

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

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, an...

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 realit...

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, h...

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....

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 t...

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 ...

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Stop for Bud is Jørgen Leth's first film and the first in his long collaboration with Ole John. […] they wanted to "blow up cinematic conventions and invent cinematic language from scratch". The jazz pianist Bud Powell moves around Copenhagen -- thro...

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...

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...

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 a...

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 roo...

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....

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

Leth's television production of Sanct Hansaften-Spil by the Danish playwright Adam Oehlenshläger is an attempt to take the poetic play at face value and bring it to life in a series of tableaux with settings by Per Kirkeby and acted by a large number...