DE FEM BENSPÆND

‘Fear and loathing, featuring Lars von Trier’ could serve as a fitting description for this film. In 1967 Danish director Jørgen Leth made a short film, entitled The Perfect Human. Von Trier greatly admires this film and reveres Leth.

In The Five Obstructions he puts fellow-filmmaker and countryman to the test. Leth agreed to submit himself to an experiment, allowing Von Trier to make up the rules. The founder of the Dogma movement devised a set of tough challenges for Leth. He is instructed to re-make The Perfect Human five times – with increasingly sadistic commands and extreme limitations.

The results are object lessons in overcoming filmmaking’s challenges and frameworks. The contact between the two directors produces a fascinating spectacle, and the five brilliant interwoven variations on The Perfect Human are both beautiful and exciting. In the end, this fruitful experiment brings forth issues of a filmmaker’s integrity, the complex ways creativity works and the laws of filmmaking.

(International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam 2003)

„One always tries to make a better film. That’s what you mustn’t do. You always try to be too good. This is therapy, not a film competition with yourself.” (Lars von Trier to Jørgen Leth) 

„There are just a few areas on which I think I’m an expert. One of them is Jørgen Leth.” (Lars von Trier)