Name: Nymphomaniac
Director: Lars von Trier
Released: 2013

When the original Dogma manifesto needed a first film to prove its vow of chastity, Thomas Vinterberg’s The Celebration (Festen) answered with the Jury Prize at Cannes — and Trine Dyrholm was in its ensemble. Zentropa’s reboot, Dogma25, now brings her back under a new rulebook, and its second production surrounds the Danish actress with two American names, Christian Slater and Dree Hemingway, under a vow that keeps the internet out of every creative process.

As Deadline first reported, the three will star in Incidents of Intimacy, the first feature by Danish artist Jesper Just. Dyrholm plays a woman unable to reach her own feelings, who builds intimacy by stealing objects from people instead of getting close to them and files them in an “archive of intimacy” in her cupboard. A triangular relationship destabilises that system until her controlled world becomes, in the synopsis’ words, “a site of emotional horror.” Johannes Lilleøre, Julie Agnete Vang, Laura Drasbæk and Michael Moritzen complete the Danish cast.

Deadline frames the casting as a homecoming for Dyrholm, since then one of Denmark’s best-known actresses through Susanne Bier’s Oscar-winning In a Better World, Nikolaj Arcel’s A Royal Affair and Magnus von Horn’s The Girl with the Needle. Slater, the Mr. Robot Golden Globe winner, already knows the house: he had a supporting role in Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac, a Zentropa production. Hemingway is known for Sean Baker’s Starlet and the FX limited series Love Story.

Just arrives as an acclaimed visual artist whose work sits in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim and Tate Modern. He wrote the script with Sissel Dalsgaard Thomsen, screenwriter of Isabella Eklöf’s Kalak.

Dogma25 is the initiative of May el-Toukhy, recent Golden Lion winner in Venice for Woman Unknown, who will direct one of its five films alongside Milad Alami, Annika Berg, Eklöf and Just. Its ten new dogmas, first unveiled at the Cannes Film Festival, rewrite the 1995 vow for another era: a script handwritten by the director, at least half the film without dialogue, no more than ten people behind the camera, everything rented, borrowed, found or used, and no more than a year to make it. The tenth rule reads: “Create the film as if it were your last.”

Zentropa produces all five films, financed with DR and Nordisk Film Distribution plus Netflix in the Nordics; Incidents of Intimacy is also backed by the Danish Film Institute, the Eastern Denmark Film Fund and Nordisk Film & TV Fond. Nordisk Film Distribution releases the films first, followed by Netflix in the Nordics and DR, with TrustNordisk on international sales.

The third dogma commits the five filmmakers to “real people within our physical reality – rather than in a digital one infused with algorithms.” After cinemas, the films’ Nordic home is Netflix.

Tags: casting, Christian Slater, Dogma25, Dree Hemingway, Incidents of Intimacy, Jesper Just