Susanne Bier

Returning to film, Bier directed Bird Box, an American post-apocalyptic horror film. The screenplay, by Eric Heisserer, was based on the 2014 novel of the same name by Josh Malerman. The film stars Sandra Bullock, and had its world premiere at AFI Fest on 12 November 2018. It was released worldwide on 21 December 2018 by Netflix.

In Bier's next film we follow the character of Michael who has a dream life, a promising military career, a beautiful wife and two beautiful girls. His younger brother, Jannik is a little thug, an outlaw. When Michael has to go to Afghanistan for a UN mission, the relationship between the two brothers is tense. During his trip, Michael is missing, presumed dead. Sarah is supported by Jannik who, against all odds, takes care of the family. Soon, Sarah and Jannik get closer and become lovers. The film tackles the theme of the war in Afghanistan in 2001 and the psychological aftermath of prisoners of war. The plot shows inspiration from Homer's Odyssey. It won several awards, including the audience award at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival and the Cannes Film Festival UCMF Movie Music Award. An opera based on the story of the film by Icelandic composer Daníel Bjarnason was premiered in Aarhus on 16 August 2017. It was commissioned by Den Jyske Opera. Kerstin Perski wrote the libretto and the director was Kasper Holten. To celebrate Aarhus as the European capital of culture 2017 three stage works were produced; a musical, dance and an opera all based on films by Bier were commissioned and performed in Musikhuset.

Taking a break from film, Bier directed The Night Manager, a British television serial starring Tom Hiddleston, Hugh Laurie, Olivia Colman, David Harewood, Tom Hollander, and Elizabeth Debicki. It is based on the 1993 novel of the same name by John le Carré and adapted to the present day by David Farr. The six-part series began broadcasting on BBC One on 21 February 2016. In the United States, it began on 19 April 2016 on AMC. It has been sold internationally to over 180 countries, and a second series was commissioned by the BBC and AMC. Scripting duties for the second series were handled by Matthew Orton, Charles Cumming, Namsi Khan and Francesca Gardiner.

Bier directed Serena is a 2014 American–French drama film based on the 2008 novel of the same name by American author Ron Rash. The film stars Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper as newlyweds running a timber business in 1930s North Carolina.

In 2014, Bier directed A Second Chance (Danish: En chance til), a Danish thriller film. The film stars Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Ulrich Thomsen, Maria Bonnevie, Nikolaj Lie Kaas and Lykke May Andersen. It was screened in the Special Presentations section of the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival.

In 2013 she was a member of the jury at the 63rd Berlin International Film Festival.

Director Susanne Bier said: "Our experiment in this film is about looking at how little it really takes before a child – or an adult – thinks something is deeply unjust. It really doesn't take much, and I find that profoundly interesting. And scary."

In 2013, Love Is All You Need was selected as best comedy film at the 26th European Film Awards.

Serena has received negative reviews from critics. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a score of 16% based on 106 reviews with an average rating of 4.3/10. The website's critical consensus states "Serena unites an impressive array of talent on either side of the cameras – then leaves viewers to wonder how it all went so wrong." On Metacritic the film has a score of 36 out of 100 based on reviews from 29 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews".

In 2012, she returned to romantic comedy with local Danish smash-hit Den skaldede frisør (Love is All You Need) (2012) starring Trine Dyrholm and Pierce Brosnan. And in 2014, she directed her second American feature, dark romantic drama Serena starring Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper, and shortly after followed up with Danish drama A Second Chance starring Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Ulrich Thomsen, Nikolaj Lie Kaas and Maria Bonnevie.

In 2012, Bier directed Love Is All You Need (Den skaldede frisør), Lit.: The Bald Hairdresser) a 2012 Danish romantic comedy film starring Pierce Brosnan and Trine Dyrholm.

A Danish majority production with co-producers in Sweden, In a Better World won the 2011 Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film as well as the award for Best Foreign Language Film at the 83rd Academy Awards.

In a Better World (Danish: Hævnen, "the revenge") is a 2010 Danish drama thriller film written by Anders Thomas Jensen and directed by Susanne Bier. The film stars Mikael Persbrandt, Trine Dyrholm, and Ulrich Thomsen in a story which takes place in small-town Denmark and a refugee camp in Africa.

Critics gave the film generally favorable reviews. As of 29 January 2008 on the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, 64% of critics gave the film positive reviews, based on 117 reviews. On Metacritic, the film had an average score of 63 out of 100, based on 30 reviews. The two leads received praise for their performances, particularly Benicio Del Toro as he received immense acclaim for his portrayal of Jerry, considered one of his best roles to date.

Time magazine's Richard Schickel named the film one of the Top 10 Movies of 2007, ranking it at #4, calling it a "dark, richly mounted film". While Schickel saw the film as possibly "old-fashioned stylistically, and rather manipulative in its plotting", he also saw "something deeply satisfying in the way it works out the fates of its troubled, yet believable characters."

Bier has been praised as being a director capable of making films that appeal to an international market, especially since After the Wedding (2006) was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and In a Better World (2010) went on to win the award in 2011. The international TV miniseries The Night Manager (2016), produced by BBC and AMC, received worldwide acclaim upon its premiere as well. It went on to receive 12 Primetime Emmy Awards nominations, winning one for Susanne Bier's directing efforts and four Golden Globe-nominations and three wins.

Kim Skotte called the film a "powerful and captivating drama" in Politiken. Out of the four collaborations between Jensen and Bier, he considered In a Better World to be the one most similar to Jensen's solo films and compared the combination of biblical themes and high entertainment value to Jensen's 2005 film Adam's Apples. Peter Nielsen of Dagbladet Information called In a Better World "in all ways a successful film", and although there "is no doubt that Susanne Bier can tell a good story", he was not entirely convinced: "She can seduce, and she can push the completely correct emotional buttons, so that mothers' as well as fathers' hearts are struck, but she doesn't earnestly drill her probe into the meat."

Since the completion of Open Hearts, Bier's reputation has continued to ascend with the harrowing Brødre (Brothers, 2004) and the emotionally engaging Efter Brylluppet (After the Wedding, 2006), which was nominated for Best Foreign Language film at the 2007 Academy Awards. After her first American film, Things We Lost in the Fire (2008) starring Benicio del Toro and Halle Berry, Bier went on to win the Oscar for Best Foreign Language film for In a Better World (2010).

Following the influence of Dogme 95 manifesto, Bier directed the film Open Hearts in 2002. Open Hearts tells the story of two couples whose lives are traumatized by a car crash and adultery.

Open Hearts received a 96% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes movie review website. Susanne Bier received the International Critics Award at the 2002 Toronto International Film Festival "for the fact that it proves that Dogma has come of age and matured into a potent cinematic language that skillfully captures the freeing of real emotions that extreme trauma creates within the lives of the characters in her film." The film won both the Bodil and Robert awards for Best Danish Film in 2003.

A sidestep from the easy going charm of Livet är en schlager (Once in a Lifetime, 2000), Elsker dig for evigt (Open Hearts, 2002) brought Bier's work to much wider international attention and acclaim. Acutely observed and beautifully written by Bier and Anders Thomas Jensen, the film is a perceptive and painful exploration of broken lives and interconnected tragedies. Made under Dogme 95 regulations, the film also marked a move towards a more minimalist aesthetic.

Bier returned to taboo subjects with the film The One and Only in 1999. The film is a Danish romantic comedy starring Sidse Babett Knudsen, Niels Olsen, Rafael Edholm, and Paprika Steen in a story about two unfaithful married couples faced with becoming first-time parents. The film was considered to mark a modern transition in Danish romantic comedies, The film earned both the Robert Award and Bodil Award as the Best Film of 1999.

After directing music videos, commercials and the feature films Freud Flytter Hjemmefra (Freud's Leaving Home, 1990), Det Bli'r i Familien (Family Matters, 1993), Pensionat Oscar (Like it Was Never Before, 1995) and Sekten (Credo, 1997), Bier made a breakthrough in her home country of Denmark with the film The One and Only in 1999. A romantic comedy about the fragility of life, the film won a clutch of Danish Film Academy awards and established Bier's relationship with actress Paprika Steen. The film remains one of the most successful domestic films ever released in Denmark.

Bier was married to Swedish actor and director Philip Zanden. After her divorce from Zanden, she met her current partner, the Danish singer and composer Jasper Wenga Leisner, who wrote the music for several of her films. Bier has two children, both with Zanden, Gabriel (born in 1989) and Alice Esther (born in 1995).

During her schooling, she went to Niels Steensens Gymnasium. In interviews for the media as an adult, Bier describes herself as lacking in social skills as a child, who liked to play football with boys and preferred to read books to interacting with others. After high school, citing a desire to reconnect with her Jewish roots, she studied art at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem. Later she would study architecture at the Architectural Association in London before finally returning to film and graduating from the National Film School of Denmark in 1987. De Saliges (1987), Bier's graduation film, won first prize at the Munich film school festival and was subsequently distributed by Channel Four.

Susanne Bier (Danish: [suˈsænə ˈpiɐ̯ˀ] ; born 15 April 1960) is a Danish film director, screenwriter, and producer. She is best known for her feature films Brothers, After the Wedding, In a Better World, and Bird Box, and the TV miniseries The Night Manager. Bier is the first female director to win a Golden Globe, an Emmy Award, and a European Film Award, collectively.

Susanne Bier was born to a Jewish family in Copenhagen, Denmark on 15 April 1960. The family of her father, Rudolf Salomon Baer (born 1930), emigrated from Germany to Denmark in 1933 after Hitler's rise to power. The family of her mother, Heni (née Jonas; born 1936), emigrated to Denmark from Russia at the beginning of the 20th century, to escape rising anti-semitism. In 1943, the two families fled from Denmark to Sweden, together with most Danish Jews, to escape the deportation to the Nazi death camps. Three years after the end of World War II, they returned to Denmark. The effects of the Holocaust caused Bier's parents to instill the strong moral values and principles into their children. Later, the importance of human resilience and dignity would be a recurring theme in her films.

In Susan King's article, Bier claims her Jewish heritage embedded a strong sense of family in conjunction to a sense of instability and turmoil. This pertains to her father's need to flee Germany in 1933 to Denmark, where he met Bier's mother. The two of them fled by boat to Sweden after Nazis began rounding up Jews in Denmark. Originally, Bier imagined herself married to a nice Jewish man with six children. She later decided that she wanted to pursue a career. She has been married twice and has two children, Gabriel and Alice. Despite this, she still holds family as her biggest influence and claims she would have never become a filmmaker without her children. To Bier, "family is a sense of identity". "I speak to my parents every day. I have a very close relationship to my aunts and uncles, but also my ex-husband…who comes to stay with us. I have this almost obsessive desire to whomever is close to me, I want to have a very intense, close, intimate relationship with them. That way of living definitely informs the stories I tell.”Although she frequently depicts international stories in third world countries, Bier had never been to Africa or India until she started making movies there. On her frequent interest and depiction of the Third World, Bier insists that "it is sort of pointing out that the Third World is really a part of our lives. It is unavoidable, and we need to relate to it…" As she writes in a public letter after winning the Oscar for In a Better World, "My particular world is not just Copenhagen. It had to be broader than this. My world is larger than it used to be." In Sylvaine Gold's article, Bier claims she doesn't like to be in a state of comfort when working. Typically in her films, happy and comfortable characters are met by situations of extreme sadness and catastrophe. She attributes this obsession to her parents experience during World War II when “society suddenly turned against them” because they were Jewish. Despite this obsession with tragedy, Bier says “I've had a very fortunate, very privileged life [but] I say that with all humility, because it could change tomorrow. But I have a very strong ability to empathize, to understand what things feel like." Her frequent writing collaborator Anders Thomas Jensen confirms this "humanness" in her, that "She's very good at putting herself in a character's place, which is really a gift." Bier also insists that despite her negative depictions in her films, she always wants to end a film with some vestige of hope. She never wants to alienate her audience, that it is always key to "have an ability to communicate".