Thomas Vinterberg

Together with Lars Von Trier and Susanne Bier and Lone Scherfig , Thomas Vinterberg has made up the quartet of the most international Danish directors for many years. Several masterpieces are disputed between them and the prizes received number in the hundreds. Although Vinterberg is the youngest of the four, he soon made it clear that his stories are tremendously serious, often harsh and depressing, with the dense anthropological charge that characterizes the cinema of his country. When it comes to telling the tragedies, fears, pettiness and weaknesses of the human being, Vinterberg is a master.

Thomas Vinterberg was born in Copenhagen on May 19, 1969. His early years were spent in the company of a hippy community. Son of the film critic Søren Vinterberg, the young Thomas pointed out manners and that alone explains why he was the youngest student in history to be accepted at the National Film School, at just 19 years old. After some minor jobs, his graduation short film, Sidste omgang(1993) met with great critical acclaim, winning the Munich Student Film Festival Jury Prize and first prize at the Tel Aviv Film Festival. It was the beginning of a career in which the filmmaker was to receive numerous awards. Until now he had only shot a few short films, but he had already worked with some actors who would eventually become the spearhead of Danish cinema, such as Thomas Bo Larsen , Paprika Steen , Ulrich Thomsen , Ann Eleonora Jørgensen or Nikolaj Coster- Waldau .

Vinterberg’s career gained notoriety with the Dogme 95 Movement, founded by Lars Von Trier and by Vinterberg himself, later joined by other filmmakers such as Kristian Levring and Soren Kragh-Jacobsen . They advocated a pure cinema, without external additions and where what was not strictly artistic, such as credits, was left out. Before, at the age of twenty-five, Vinterberg had shot his first feature film, De største helte (1996). It was a dramatic comedy where a father meets his twelve-year-old daughter for the first time. The film won several Danish film awards, including for actors Thomas Bo Larsen and Ulrich Thomsen . But it was with his movie Celebration (1998), filmed according to the commandments that inspired the Dogma 95 Movement, when the name of Thomas Vinterberg (who was not credited) achieved international fame. The film was a tough family story, where unhealthy secrets of a family man came out in the middle of a celebratory dinner full of diners. The film won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and earned it a Golden Globe nomination. Regarding its success, Vinterbeg says that “it was like a hand grenade exploding in my face. It suddenly gave me a lot of opportunities to do things I’ve never done before.” Which did not mean continuing with Dogma’s postulates: “I think that was the end of my career at Dogma. It was as far as I could go.”

After a few years making music videos and other minor jobs, Vinterberg went international and presented the drama Todo es por amor in 2003 , where Joaquín Phoenix , Claire Danes and Sean Penn worked . It is an interesting film, which combines love and science fiction, but which is certainly not round. And something similar happened two years later with Dear Wendy , a parable starring Jamie Bell about the use of weapons in deep America and which, despite the interesting background proposal, did not have much impact. Given which Vinterberg decided to completely change registration. He traveled to his country and shot in 2007 a minor comedy,When a Man Comes Home , with his fetish actor Thomas Bo Larsen .

Already settled in the Nordic cold, he later shot two of his most powerful films, which led to the director’s prestige returning strongly. Submarine (2010), with which he won five Danish film awards, is a hard-hitting drama about the tragedy that weighs on two brothers, whose lives have run separate paths. For his part, La caza (2012) marked the definitive return to Olympus. Starring Mads Mikkelsen , it tells the story of an elementary school teacher who sees how his life is destroyed because of a slander of child abuse. The film is terrifying and the impact on the viewer remains over time. Mikkelsen was honored at Cannes and the film deservedly earned Golden Globe and Oscar nominations.Submarine and The Hunt are films that perfectly define Vinterberg’s artistic concerns, which he explains: “I am not an anarchic creator. I am intuitive and try to find a way to explore human frailty.”

With his prestige recovered, he once again entered international co-production in Far from the Madding Crowd (2015), a remarkable adaptation of the famous novel by Thomas Hardy . And the following year he transferred his hippy life experience to the screen in The Commune (2016), an uneven film that allowed him to work again with his wife, Helene Reingaard Neumann , whom he married in 2010. Helene, second wife of Vinterberg, is also a Protestant pastor and has planted previously unknown spiritual concerns in her husband.

He was also successful with the film Kursk (2018), which narrates the true events of the unsuccessful rescue of the ill-fated Russian submarine that sank in the icy waters of the Barents Sea in the year 2000. And two years later, already installed on top of the European cinema, Vinterberg premiered one of his best films, Another Round , in which the Danish director explores the advantages and dangers of becoming addicted to alcohol consumption. The film has earned Oscar nominations in two categories, Best Foreign Language Film and Best Director.