Dogma 95: Thirty years later

This year marks exactly thirty years since a group of Danish filmmakers – including Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg – shook up the film industry with a manifesto that aimed at a radical return to the purity of cinema: Dogma 95. During an event dedicated to the centenary of cinema, Lars von Trier threw five hundred red pamphlets into the audience, with a manifesto that was supposed to save cinema. The manifesto prescribed ten strict rules and was a plea for raw and honest films, filmed with a handheld camera on real locations and excluding the use of special effects, props or artificial light.

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It began as a provocation, but it became an influential movement. A total of 35 films were released under the Dogma-95 label, with the best and most successful coming from Denmark. In an era when films were becoming increasingly spectacular and leaning on expensive special effects, the Dogma films offered an alternative. They asked the question: what remains of cinema if you take away all the frills? According to the manifesto, films should purely concentrate on the story and the actors’ performances, a development welcomed by independent filmmakers worldwide. Yet there was also criticism, as the ten rules filmmakers had to comply with were in fact almost as rigid as the demands of Hollywood bosses.

Thirty years after the publication of the Dogma 95 manifesto, we take stock and look back at some key films of the Dogma movement with a short retrospective. Fun fact: during the Cannes Film Festival, a group of Danish and Swedish filmmakers published Dogma 25, an updated version of the Dogma 95 manifesto, which mainly prohibits the use of the internet, artificial intelligence and other technological tools in the film production process.