Zentropa
(aka Europa)

Actress Barbara Sukowa in Person March 6
Screening on Film

Directed by Lars von Trier.
With Jean-Marc Barr, Barbara Sukowa, Udo Kier.
Denmark/Sweden/France/Germany/Switzerland, 1991, 35mm, color and b&w, 112 min.
English and German with English subtitles.

A visually stunning film whose wide-screen, multilayered compositions produce a chilling hypnotic effect, Zentropa is a nightmarish travelogue that follows a young protagonist’s return to a dystopian Germany immediately after the Second World War. Leo Kessler (Barr) finds himself entangled with an ambiguous woman (Sukowa), American Occupation authorities, pro-Nazi terrorists, and Zentropa—a giant railway corporation that becomes the center of a power struggle for the new order. Using rear projection, superimposition, and nonnaturalistic color, von Trier creates a complex, hybrid cinema of illusion and allusion that he would later reject as excessive.