“You will now listen to my voice . . . On the count of ten you will be in Europa . . .”
So begins Max von Sydow’s opening narration to Lars von Trier’s hypnotic Europa, a fever dream in which American pacifist Leopold Kessler stumbles into a job as a sleeping-car conductor for the Zentropa railways in a Kafkaesque 1945 postwar Frankfurt.
With its gorgeous black-and-white and color imagery and meticulously recreated (if then nightmarishly deconstructed) costumes and sets, Europa is one of the great Danish filmmaker’s weirdest and most wonderful works, a runaway train ride to an oddly futuristic past. --The Criterion Collection
Cast:Jean-Marc Barr, Barbara Sukowa, Udo Kier, Ernst-Hugo Järegård, Henning Jensen, Erik Mørk, Eddie Constantine, Max von Sydow
Cannes (In Competition): Jury Prize, Best Artistic Contribution, Technical Grand Prize, Stockholm (Competition): Bronze Horse, Ghent: Grand Prix
About this movie
Title: Europa (1991)
Directed by: Lars von Trier
Date of birth: 30 April 1956, Copenhagen, Denmark
Writing credits: Lars von Trier, Niels Vørsel
Music: Joachim Holbek
Year: 1991
Country: Denmark | Sweden | France | Germany | Switzerland
Language: English | German
Color: Black and White | Color
Runtime: 112 min.