For a man who is accused of hating women, von Trier sure has some of the best actors giving him their loyalty. Charlotte Gainsbourg is my favourite example. She has an incredible depth to her performances and doesn’t rely on stereotypical roles to get her point across. Von Trier is known for pushing his actors to the absolute limit, so it was actually a challenge not to include too many of his colleagues on this list. Of the sexism controversy, Gainsbourg says, “People have said he doesn’t like women but I don’t see how you can portray characters with such depth and not feel for them, have no empathy? I think he loves women.”

Though there are at least three films in which Charlotte pulls from the absolute depths of human experience, I’ll focus on Antichrist for its horrifying climax scene involving self genital mutilation. Playing a grieving mother after the death of her child, she retreats to a cabin in the woods with her psychiatrist husband to devastating results. “She says that the hardest scenes to film were not those that required her to perform explicit sex acts or horrific violence … but those that tested her emotional limits.” This makes total sense for me, as I uncomfortable through the entire film - so much so that it took me three tries to finish.