Maybe it wasn’t a good idea for Lars Von Trier to get an Instagram account. He’s discovered the ways social media can totally backfire on you.
The Danish filmmaker received backlash after a post that criticized Denmark’s donation of F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine.
“Russian lives matter also!” he wrote on Instagram on Tuesday after Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s visit to Denmark. Von Trier addressed the controversy last night:
Mr Zelensky and Mr Putin, and not least Mrs Frederiksen (who yesterday, like someone head over heels in love, posed in the cockpit of one of the scariest killing machines of our time, grinning from ear to ear).
Von Trier eventually disabled the comments on the post, but Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council actually replied to Von Trier’s post, writing on Twitter:
War is not a movie where actors play life and death. Behind every living Russian terrorist, there is a dead Ukrainian. The choice between the executioner and the victim becomes a tragedy when the artist chooses the side of the executioner.
Ukraine doesn’t live in abstraction, but in a cruel reality in which Russians are murderers. A simple piece of advice for a famous director: imagine that it is a Russian missile that is flying into his city every day, that his father or mother was killed, his grandson was taken to Russia, and that a Russian looter raped his wife before burning down his house. In this case, the abstraction of hypocritical ‘humanism’ takes on completely different features – real, not fictional life.
On Thursday, Von Trier replied, writing that he “supports Ukraine with every beat of my heart! I was just stating the obvious: that all lives in this world matter! A forgotten phrase it seems, from a time when pacifism was a virtue.”
Meanwhile, Von Trier is battling Parkinson’s, but recently stated that he has a “few movies left in me.” He’s looking for a girlfriend on Instagram, and would like for her to also be his muse.
Von Trier has directed more than 14 feature films, including “Dancer in the Dark”, “Breaking the Waves” and “Melancholia”.