Lars von Trier
He started producing small films from childhood, and as a young man made two half-hour long, privately-financed fiction films: The Orchid Gardener (1977) and Menthe la bienheureuse (1979). During film school, he made the short film Nocturne (1981), which won an award at the Filmschoolfest Munich 1981, and Liberation Pictures (1982), whose hypnotic modernist imagery is characteristic of Trier's early works. The so-called Europa trilogy, which revolves around the male idealist in a downfall universe, includes the feature film debut The Element of Crime (1984), the experimental low-budget Epidemic (1987) and the much-maligned melodrama Europe (1991). The television production Medea (1988) was based on Carl Th.