Lars von Trier is a Danish film director and screenwriter. Beginning in the late-1960s as a child actor working on Danish television series Secret Summer, von Trier's career has spanned more than five decades. Considered a major figure of the European film industry, he and his works have been variously described as ambitious and provocative, as well as technically innovative. His films offer confrontational examinations of existential, social, psychosexual, and political issues, and deal in subjects including mercy, sacrifice, and mental health. He frequently collaborates with the actors Jens Albinus, Jean-Marc Barr, Udo Kier and Stellan Skarsgård.

Born Lars Trier in Kongens Lyngby, Denmark, north of Copenhagen, his parents are Inger Høst and Ulf Trier. He later learned from Inger's deathbed that his biological father was Fritz Michael Hartmann, Inger's former boss at Denmark's Ministry of Social Affairs and a World War II resistance fighter.

In 1989, von Trier's mother confessed to him on her deathbed that his biological father was not the man who raised him, but her former employer, Fritz Michael Hartmann (1909–2000), who was descended from a long line of Danish classical musicians. Hartmann's grandfather was Emil Hartmann, and his great-grandfather J. P. E. Hartmann. His uncles included Niels Gade and Johan Ernst Hartmann, and Niels Viggo Bentzon was his cousin. She stated that she did this to give her son "artistic genes". Von Trier has jokingly said, by reference to the distant German origin of the Hartmann family, that while he believed he had a Jewish background, he is "really more of a Nazi."