Dogville

Dogville is a 2003 avant-garde drama film written and directed by Lars von Trier, and starring an ensemble cast led by Nicole Kidman, Lauren Bacall, Paul Bettany, Chloë Sevigny, Stellan Skarsgård, Udo Kier, Ben Gazzara, Patricia Clarkson, Harriet Andersson, and James Caan with John Hurt narrating. It is a parable that uses an extremely minimal, stage-like set to tell the story of Grace Mulligan (Kidman), a woman hiding from mobsters, who arrives in the small mountain town of Dogville, Colorado, and is provided refuge in return for physical labor. The film is the first in von Trier's incomplete USA – Land of Opportunities trilogy, which was followed by Manderlay (2005) and is projected to be completed with Washington. The film was in competition for the Palme d'Or at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival. It was screened at various film festivals before receiving a limited release in the US on March 26, 2004. Dogville opened to polarized reviews from critics. Some considered it to be pretentious or exasperating; it was viewed by others as a masterpiece, and has widely grown in stature since its initial release. It was later included in the 2016 poll of the greatest films since 2000 conducted by BBC. Since then, filmmakers such as Quentin Tarantino and Denis Villeneuve have praised the film. Plot structure The story of Dogville is told in nine chapters and a prologue, with a one-sentence description of each chapter given in the film, in the vein of such chapter headings in many 19th-century novels. These descriptions are given below.