About

‘Alabama, 1933. A caravan of black limousines carries gangsters from a gold mining town in Colorado to a rural Alabama area where slavery still survives as an institution. Alabama looks uncannily like Colorado, as it must: The story that began in Lars Von Trier's Dogville 2003 continues here, with the same visual strategy of placing all the action on a sound stage, with chalk lines indicating the outlines of locations. A few rudimentary props flesh out the action, including doors, windows, and machineguns.

The movie is the second in a trilogy by Von Trier, who has never visited the United States but has set several movies here, all of them generated by his ideas about American greed, racism and the misuse of power. To say his America is not recognizable to any American is beside the point; neither is the America in most Hollywood entertainments. Presenting imaginary worlds as if they were real is how movies work.

Von Trier's purpose is fiercely polemical. The Danish iconoclast holds strong ideas about our society, and expresses them in satiric allegories of such audacity that we cast loose from realism and simply float with his conceits.’ Roger Ebert

MA15+