After seeing a group of seemingly disabled people cause chaos in a restaurant, Karen follows them and discovers that this group of young people are ‘spassing’—pretending to be mentally disabled as a way to rebel against bourgeoise society. By embracing their ‘inner idiots’, they push themselves to embrace the forbidden and disrupt the status quo.

Danish cinema’s enfant terrible Lars Von Trier takes up the banner of Dogme 95 with the cinematic movement’s second official film. This dark satire scandalises audiences with its incendiary philosophy while ushering in a new style of filmmaking that has since inspired many an independent filmmaker. Banned and censored in numerous countries, the subversive shock value of The Idiots has not waned in the 25 years since its original release. M+ Cinema will present a new uncut 4K restoration of the film that was released in 2023.

The screening on 28 January will be followed by a post-screening talk on the significance of the Dogme 95 movement and The Idiots by film critic and lecturer Dr Derek Lam. The talk will be moderated by M+ Assistant Curator Francisco Lo in Cantonese.

Lars Von Trier (b. 1956, Denmark) stunned the film world with his feature film debut Element of Crime in 1984, winning over audiences and film festivals with his idiosyncratic take on film noir. In 1995, he and fellow Danish filmmaker Thomas Vinterberg co-founded the Dogme 95 movement with a manifesto that shunned studio sets, lighting, non-diegetic sound, and special effects, among other common modern filmmaking practices. Inspired by Von Trier’s own Breaking the Waves (1996), Dogme 95 attempts to strip cinema of what it deems as non-essential and artificial, turning the focus to the fundamentals of the medium. Von Trier contributed The Idiots (1998) to the movement as filmmakers around the world responded to Dogme 95 with their own films. Von Trier has since continued to draw controversy with his public statements and films such as Dancer in the Dark (2000), Dogville (2003), and Nymphomaniac (2013).