Bier’s works are probably equally, if not more, influenced by her family background. Born to Jewish parents in 1960, Bier feels that her cultural backgrounds lends her strength, especially her family values, which is often reflected in her films’ characters. In her first film Freud Leaving Home, the manuscript was by Marianne Goldman, who was Jewish-Swedish, and narrates a Jewish family facing and trying to deal with love, sickness and death, and also sets the table for discourse regarding what it means to be Jewish and the associated cultural stereotypes in the eyes of both the non-Jewish and the Jewish themselves. Bier has a very strong opinion of the Jewish culture herself, and is interested in using the film medium to explore the Jewish …show more content…
This was obvious in Trier’s case - besides the anxiety caused by his upbringing, he also went through a period when depression plagued his life. He was admitted to hospital in the early part of 2007, saying that he ‘lost focus and took no pleasure in his work’. This escalation into depression came closely after the death of his mother, and more precisely, it was the announcement on her deathbed that his father was in fact not his biological father, that threw Trier completely off track. Although his family were not religious and more atheist, Trier had taken some form of pride in his Jewish background for it made him feel exotic, this was however broken upon this revelation. In fact, he is now German! Having portrayed his thoughts towards the Holocaust, Jews and Nazis since his very first films like The Orchid Gardener (1977), Images of Liberation and Europa, one can only imagine his mental breakdown. Never having imagined that his family would have kept such a secret, or even any secrets at all, this dealt him a great blow and fuelled his unstable mental state. As mentioned previously, one of the trilogies that Trier worked on was the Depression Trilogy, and of this trilogy, Melancholia was one of the films that reflect how Trier’s work was heavily influenced by his depression. Of the two main characters Justine and Claire, Justine herself had her personality based