The Zentropa film production company, created by Danish director Lars von Trier and Peter Aalbæk Jensen four decades ago, released a statement about the 66-year-old filmmaker's health, detailing that he suffers from Parkinson's.
“He is animated and receiving treatment,” explained the announcement released this Monday.
More information
Lars von Trier: "My audience may have grown old for some violent sequences"
Admired and controversial in equal measure, in the mid-1990s Lars von Trier launched the manifesto of the Dogma film movement and with it claimed auteur cinema and aroused international interest in the filmography of Northern Europe.
But the truth is that by then he had already managed to capture the attention of the juries at international festivals such as Cannes, where he debuted in 1984 and has presented all his films, except for
Nynphomaniac
.
Director Lars von Trier, at the Berlin festival in 2014, shows a T-shirt that reads that he was declared persona non grata in Cannes.
.JOHANNES EISELE (AFP)
Raw, intense and sparing, the creator of
Breaking the Waves
or
Dancing in the Dark
won the Grand Jury Prize and the Palme d'Or, respectively, for these films at the great French festival.
But it was also there that he had an ugly run-in with the press during the presentation of
Melancholia
in 2011. The director jumped at the question of a journalist who questioned his German roots, and sarcastically said he was a Nazi, so, despite his subsequent excuses, the festival ended up declaring him persona non grata and expelling him for a year.
In 2018 he returned to Cannes.
This September, Von Trier is scheduled to go to Venice to present the final season of a television trilogy he has been working on for years.
The new installment is titled
The Kingdom of the Exodus
and, according to the producer, the director continues to work despite the diagnosis.
In recent years, when asked about his tremors, as a journalist from
The Guardian
did , Von Trier replied that it was the effect of withdrawal from alcohol and antidepressants.
Now it has been announced that he is Parkinson's.
