Danish Directors

Profiling the canonized figures alongside recently-established filmmakers, this collection features interviews with Lars von Trier, Søren Kragh-Jacobsen, Thomas Vinterberg and Henning Carlsen among many others. It poses questions that engage with ongoing and controversial issues within film studies, which will stimulate debate in academic and filmgoing circles alike.

Each interview is preceded by a photograph of the director, biographical information, and a filmography. Frame enlargements are used throughout to help clarify particular points of discussion and the book as a whole is contextualised by an informative general introduction. A valuable addition to the growing library of books on Scandinavian film, national cinema and minority cinema.

Ib Bondebjerg is professor of film and media studies, Department of Media, Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen, and was the founder and director of the Centre for Modern European Studies (2008-20011). From 2000 to 2009 he was the editor of Northern Lights: Film and Media Studies Yearbook and he is part of the advisory board of Studies in Documentary Film and Journal of Scandinavian Cinema. His main research area is European film and media culture and documentary genres. He was co-director of the ESF Research project Changing Media - Changing Europe (2000-2005) and is co-director of the HERA project, Mediating Cultural Encounters Through European Screens (MeCETES, 2013-216). His most recent publications are Media, Democracy and European Culture (2008, co-editor and contributor), Narratives of Reality: The History of the Danish Television Documentary (2008, in Danish), Images of Reality: The Modern Danish Film Documentary (2012, in Danish), Engaging with Reality: Documentary and Globalization (2014) and Danish Directors 3: Dialogues on the New Danish Documentary Cinema (co-editor, 2014).   Mette Hjort is chair professor of humanities and dean of arts at Hong Kong Baptist University, affiliate professor of Scandinavian studies at the University of Washington, Seattle, and visiting professor of creative industries at the University of South Wales. Her current research interests include film and public value, moving images in the context of health and well-being and talent development on a North/South basis. Her research on the last theme is described in her contribution to African Cinema and Human Rights (Indiana University Press, 2019), which she co-edited with Eva Jørholt.