Susanne Bier

Though Academy Award®, Golden Globe Award and Emmy Award winning writer and director Susanne Bier’s films often play out against a wide-reaching global backdrop, their focus is intimate, carefully exploring the explosive emotions and complexities of familial bonds. This unique combination is part of the formula that has made her Denmark’s leading female filmmaker and a powerhouse worldwide.

Bier’s 2010 film In a Better World won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2011, as well as an Italian Golden Globe Award® for Best European Film and Best Director at the European Film Awards. In 2007, Bier directed the award-winning Things We Lost in the Fire, starring Halle Berry and Benicio Del Toro, her first English-language film. Prior to this, as a writer/director she had helmed the multi-award-winning After the Wedding (2006), which was also an Academy Award® nominee for Best Foreign Language Film, and Brothers (2004), which won, among others, the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival and at the Boston Independent Film Festival. In 2002, Bier directed Open Hearts, shot in accordance with the Dogme ’95 filmmaking aesthetic. The film won numerous awards, including the Audience Award at the Robert Festival (Danish Academy Award) and the International Film Critics’ Award at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Bier also co-wrote and directed the romantic comedy The One and Only (1999), which won Best Film at the Danish Robert Awards and was the most watched domestic film in Denmark in 20 years, with one-fifth of the country’s population having seen it at the cinema. In 2012, Bier made her triumphant return to the genre with the 2013 winner of the European Film Award for Best Comedy, Love Is All You Need, starring Pierce Brosnan and Trine Dyrholm. In 2014, Bier directed A Second Chance, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Bier won the Emmy Award for directing the six-part mini-series The Night Manager (2016), starring Tom Hiddleston and Hugh Laurie, based on the 1993 novel of the same name by John le Carré.

Susanne Bier’s latest project is Netflix’s thriller Bird Box, starring Sandra Bullock.