Dancer in the Dark

Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark won the Palme d'Or at Cannes 2000, with Björk taking the Best Actress prize. The film completed von Trier's loose Golden Heart trilogy after Breaking the Waves (1996) and The Idiots (1998), all centred on women whose absolute moral commitment costs them everything. Björk had agreed to perform the lead with the understanding that she would not act again in cinema, a commitment she has largely kept across the intervening twenty-five years.

1964, a small Washington State factory town. Selma Ježková (Björk), a Czech immigrant working at a stamping plant, is going slowly blind from a hereditary condition; she is saving every cent so that her young son will not inherit the same fate without surgery to prevent it. To bear the work of the factory floor she escapes into elaborate musical fantasies set to industrial-machine rhythms. Catherine Deneuve plays her closest friend; David Morse plays the police-officer landlord whose own financial crisis intersects with Selma's plans.

The film is shot half-and-half between handheld documentary realism (the Selma timeline, on hundred-camera digital-video systems Trier had developed for the production) and choreographed musical sequences (Vincent Paterson's choreography to Björk's original songs). Björk's central performance (physically frail, vocally extraordinary, finally heartbreaking) is one of the most-discussed central performances in 2000s European cinema. The closing musical number is among the most-cited single sequences of the decade.