Danish film-maker and provocateur Lars von Trier has defended himself from backlash after writing a social media post that criticised Denmark’s donation of F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine.
“Russian lives matter also!” he wrote on Instagram on Tuesday after Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s visit to Denmark, where he and Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, inspected the F-16s to be delivered to his country.
Von Trier addressed his post to “Mr Zelensky and Mr Putin, and not least Mrs Frederiksen (who yesterday, like someone head over heels in love, posed in the cockpit of one of the scariest killing machines of our time, grinning from ear to ear).”
Von Trier disabled comments on the post but it attracted the attention of Russian and Ukrainian media. Oleksiy Danilov, head of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, shared the director’s post, writing on Twitter: “War is not a movie where actors play life and death. Behind every living Russian terrorist, there is a dead Ukrainian. The choice between the executioner and the victim becomes a tragedy when the artist chooses the side of the executioner.
“Ukraine doesn’t live in abstraction, but in a cruel reality in which Russians are murderers. A simple piece of advice for a famous director: imagine that it is a Russian missile that is flying into his city every day, that his father or mother was killed, his grandson was taken to Russia, and that a Russian looter raped his wife before burning down his house. In this case, the abstraction of hypocritical ‘humanism’ takes on completely different features – real, not fictional life.”
On Thursday, the 67-year-old director wrote that he “support[s] Ukraine with every beat of my heart! I was just stating the obvious: that all lives in this world matter! A forgotten phrase it seems, from a time when pacifism was a virtue.”
The Danish press also questioned the remarks from the director, who in 2011 caused a storm when he said he “understood” Hitler during a press conference at the Cannes film festival. He was expelled by the organisers and subsequently investigated by Danish police and later apologised for the remark.
“It was really tough,” he told the Guardian in 2018, of the furore.
Von Trier made also headlines last week when he shared a video advertising his desire for a “girlfriend and muse”.
“I am 67 years old. I have Parkinson’s, OCD and an at the moment controlled alcoholism. In short, with any luck I should still have a few decent movies left in me,” he said in the video shared on his Instagram account.
“All this is meant as an old-school contact ad, where I, without knowing the least about social media, [am] looking for a female girlfriend/muse. And despite all the whining, I still insist that on a good day, in the right company, I can be quite a charming partner. Thank you for your infinite patience.”
One of the biggest stars of Danish cinema, Von Trier has directed more than 14 feature films, often disturbing and violent. Known for his dark sense of humour, he won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2000 for Dancer in the Dark.
Agence France-Presse contributed to this report
