Kristian Levring
| Kristian Levring | |
|---|---|
| Born |
May 9, 1957 Denmark |
| Occupation | Film director, screenwriter, film editor |
Kristian Levring (born May 9, 1957) is a Danish film director. He was the fourth signatory of the Dogme95 movement. His feature films as director include Et skud fra hjertet, The King is Alive, The Intended, Fear Me Not, and The Salvation.
Kristian Levring was born in 1957 in Denmark. He later became a graduate of the National Film School of Denmark.
Kristian Levring began his career as a documentarian, editing a number of feature-length documentaries and Danish-language feature films during the first two decades of his time as a filmmaker. He also worked as a director for television commercials. His first feature film he directed was Et skud fra hjertet (Shot from the Heart), released in 1986. Kristian Levring was the fourth signatory of the Dogme95 movement, however moved away from this style towards the end of the aughts. He co-signed the original manifesto in 1995 alongside Lars von Trier, Thomas Vinterberg, and Søren Kragh-Jacobsen. In 2008, Levring and the other Dogme 95 founders were honoured with the Achievement in World Cinema award at the European Film Awards.
Levring released the film The King is Alive in 2000. The Guardian describes the film as following, "bus passengers stranded in the Namibian desert, who decide to stage their own private performance of King Lear to pass the time until help arrives." The passengers are stranded in an abandoned mining town in the middle of the Sahara. The film utilized Lear as a foil for European society reaching a terminal crisis. The words of Lear are used to further show the disintegration of the group into chaos under the pressure of their stranding. While one of the members is sent on a five-day journey to get help, the social relationships that Levring explores among those that stay behind include gender, marital, and the racial elements of the relationship between the passengers and the bus driver. The film was named an Official Selection at the Cannes Film Festival upon its premiere.
The film has many elements in line with the Dogme95 cinematic beliefs, including placing film as a post-apocalyptic art form. Jan Simons wrote that, "The King is Alive allows us to see Dogma 95 in actu, as it were. With no decor and no costumes, in the natural light of the sun's glare, and with no recourse to the technical resources of theatre, the amateur actors study their roles; Henry writes everybody's lines out by hand, from memory." Referencing to the rules of Dogma 95 are also found throughout the film.The New York Times wrote of Levring's work on the film that,
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