Twenty-five minutes of the film shot more than 30 years ago will be on DVD later this month; von Trier had shelved it in late 1990s.

Danish director Lars von Trier, who is currently shooting Melancholia in Sweden, had originally announced that Dimension – a film project he intended to shoot for 30 years – should be launched on  Apr 30, 2024, when he will be 68.

But the 25 minutes of his unfinished oeuvre will be released later this month (Aug 25) on a DVD of Nordic Short Films, compiled by Danish film magazine Ekko in collaboration with Finland’s Episodi, Norway’s Rushprint and Sweden’s FlM.

In 1990, von Trier and his then-scriptwriter Niels Vørsel, announced they would start Dimension — ”a European film collage – a kind of monument of the future. Our idea and goal are to make a feature with the passage of time as its all-prevailing undercurrent,” they declared.

During the next years they filmed three-minute sequences with, among others, Stellan Skarsgård, Eddie Constantine, Jean-Marc Barr, Katrin Cartlidge and Jens Okking. Then in the late 1990s von Trier lost interest, and the project was shelved by his producer, Peter Aalbæk Jensen.

Commenting on the DVD’s soundtrack, Danish von Trier expert Peter Schepelern describes the film as “a poetic gangster movie, a monument to the time and an era of Danish cinema when that sort of bizarre experiments won support.”

In the meantime the director proclaimed ”no more happy endings,” as he commenced principal photography for Melancholia, ”a beautiful movie about the end of the world,” which will wrap at Trollhättan next month (Sep 8) to be readied for a May 2011 première.

Starring Kirsten Dunst, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Kiefer Sutherland, Charlotte Rampling, John Hurt, Alexander Skarsgård, Stellan Skarsgård, Jesper Christensen, Udo Kier, Brady Corbet and Cameron Spurr, the film has been presold to more than 20 countries by TrustNordisk.

 

Topics