Von Trier is a Danish director, screenwriter, producer, editor and cinematographer. He grew up in an atheist and communist family that practiced nudism and, as Trier described, “emotions, religion and pleasure” were forbidden. His childhood had a great influence on his later work on film. He started to make his first films at the age of eleven with his mother’s super 8 camera. He studied film theory at the University in Copenhagen and afterwards film directing at the Danish National Film School. He graduated in 1983 with the medium-length film Images of Liberation (Befrielsesbilleder, 1982), which won the main award at the Munich Film Festival. After that his colleagues made a joke and referred to him as "von Trier", but he liked that addition to his last name so much that he kept it, partly as a reference to the great Erich von Stroheim and Josef von Sternberg. His feature film debut was the crime drama Element of Crime (Forbrydelsens element, 1984) that attracted the attention of international audience and critics alike. Then he directed the horror film Epidemic (1987), which together with his first film and the thriller Europa (1991) make up a trilogy. In late 1980’s he started to direct for television and directed the film adaptation of Euripid’s drama Medeia (1988) and the TV series Riget (1994-1997) that clearly discloses the author’s signature. In 1992, together with the producer Peter Aalbæk Jensen, he founded the international film production company Zentropa Entertainment, primarily because he wanted to gain financial independence and more creative freedom. TV series Riget was their first project. In 1995, together with director Thomas Vinterberg, he presented Dogma 95, film movement that promoted, among other things, making films without any special effects, without lighting and with a hand-held camera. He had his biggest success until then with the drama Breaking the Waves (1996) starring Emily Watson and Stellan Skarsgård. The film won the jury’s award at Cannes in 1996 and many other awards at festivals around the world where it was shown. His next film was the comic drama The Idiots (Idioterne, 1998), his first film made according to the principles of Dogma 95. However, this film did not have much success unlike his next one - Dancer in the Dark (2000) in English language and starring Björk. It is one of the first films in the world entirely shot with digital equipment and it won the Golden Palm in Cannes while Björk won the award as best actress, along with many other awards around the world. These three films make up the trilogy of Golden Heart and in all of them the heroine keeps her good spirits and a golden heart in spite of the troubles she faces. Next he directed Dogville (2003), starring Nicole Kidman. It marked the beginning of the new trilogy USA – Country of possibilities, made up of the less succesful Manderlay (2005), and the third title Washington, which is still in pre-production. Both films have a characteristic minimalist set design and question the issues from the American society such as intolerance and slavery. He directed also the comedy Direktøren for det hele (2006) in Danish and through a process that he refers to as automavision. It is a process in which he as a director sets a fixed position for the camera and then lets the computer zoom in randomly, shift and so on. He wrote the screenplay for his autobiographical film The Early Years: Erik Nietzsche Part 1 (2007) about his years as a student and it was directed by Jacob Thuesen. Jonatan Spang stars as Trier’s alter ego and Trier is the narrator. Currently his last films make up the so-called Depressive Trilogy and are interconnected by focus on loss and depression (whoch, besides many phobias he is fighting in real life) as well as the main protagonist, Charlotte Gainsbourg. The first film in this trilogy is the controversial Antichrist (2009) starring Willem Dafoe, the second is the drama Melancholia (2011), also starring Charlotte Gainsbourg as well as many other famous actors. The last part of the trilogy is Nymphomaniac (2013), originally planned as one film but due to its length distributed as a two-part film. He is currently working on his film The House That Jack Built about a serial killer from America. Trier once said that his only paragon in film making is the Danish film director Carl Theodor Dreyer. Trier’s work is characterized by a specific author vision and collaboration with actors as well as a steady film crew that he has been working on for most of his career.