Do we like them?Do we like Lars von Trier?
Our score: 5 out of 10. No campaigning against any group turned up, but a Hitler-sympathy 'joke', a contested Ukraine post and denied on-set claims leave a mixed record.
Von Trier is the Danish director who made Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark and Melancholia, and who has spent his career being deliberately difficult. He co-founded the production company Zentropa and has long treated provocation as part of the job. That context matters, because most of his trouble comes from jokes that landed badly, not from policy or campaigning.
The big one was Cannes in 2011. At a Melancholia press conference he said “I understand Hitler. He did some wrong things, absolutely,” and added that he sympathised with him a little bit. The festival declared him persona non grata, and he apologised the same day, saying he was not anti-Semitic or racially prejudiced and not a Nazi. French authorities charged him under a law on justifying war crimes, but the Grasse prosecutor recommended he not be prosecuted and the case was reported closed.
Years later he told the Copenhagen Post's source interview it was a remark made to end an argument, and Cannes took him back in 2018 with The House That Jack Built, shown out of competition. The apology was real but a bit slippery, since he reportedly retracted it and called the whole episode stupid. Still, it was a bad joke, not a campaign.
On the harm check, we found nothing from him about trans people, LGBTQ+ people, vaccines, climate or migrants, and no record of campaigning for anyone's harm. The nearest thing is August 2023, when he posted “Russian lives matter also!” on Instagram after Denmark's F-16 pledge to Ukraine. A senior Ukrainian official said it showed the artist choosing the side of the executioner; von Trier said he supports Ukraine and was just stating the obvious that all lives matter. That's a contested position, not a pattern.
The good-person side is harder. In 2017 Björk described harassment by an unnamed Danish director on a film shoot, and coverage took it to mean Dancer in the Dark. Von Trier denied it, and his business partner Peter Aalbæk Jensen said the two had clashed badly but called the pair victims. Separately, nine women told Politiken of a harassment and bullying culture at Zentropa, mostly aimed at Jensen; the report did not accuse von Trier, who co-owns the company.
On the good stuff, it's thin on charity and heavy on art. He has been recognised in Denmark with the Sonning Prize, and plenty of people love his films, but we found no causes he has backed or kind acts we could source. That's honestly the whole list.