Programmed March 2025

Dogme 95

Thirty years ago, a group of filmmakers led by Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg issued a provocative manifesto for a new avant-garde. Demanding that adherents take a series of “vows of chastity,” the movement known as Dogme 95 sought to liberate filmmaking from genre conventions and stylistic artifice, using handheld camera work, natural lighting and sound, and location shooting to achieve an intense, character-focused authenticity. This sampling includes some of Dogme’s defining entries—such as Vinterberg’s shattering chamber drama The Celebration and Harmony Korine’s fractured family portrait Julien Donkey-Boy —as well as von Trier’s visionary musical Dancer in the Dark , a post-Dogme film that draws from the manifesto’s ethos even as it violates some of its core precepts. Finding creativity in constraint, these films reveal the lasting influence of an electrifying call to action that helped usher cinema into the new century.