Danish film directors

Henrik Ruben Genz (born 7 November 1959 in Gram, Denmark) is a Danish film director.
Before becoming involved with film, Genz attended Designskolen Kolding, where he studied graphic design, after giving up on an earlier dream of being a painter. While there, he did some work with video, and a chance meeting with director Arne Bro encouraged him to pursue film as a career. Genz was then accepted into the National Film School of Denmark at the age of 31, graduating after completing the well-regarded short film Cross Roads (Danish title: Omveje, Detours) in 1995.Genz's next work, the short film Theis and Nico (Danish title: Bror, min bror, Brother, my brother), released in 1999, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film. He then became involved with the Dogme 95 movement, but was unable to produce any quality work after six months of effort. Speaking later about his difficulty in trying to work under the Dogme restrictions, he described himself as a "visual director" and Dogme as a movement where "the camera follows the [actors] and choice means nothing".In 2003, Genz released his first feature film, an adaptation of the children's book Someone like Hodder (Danish title: En som Hodder) by popular writer Bjarne Reuter. He followed it in 2005 with Chinaman (Danish title: Kinamand), a romantic comedy about a man who takes a foreign wife in an arranged marriage so that she can obtain permission for residency, and then falls in love with her.Genz returned to his roots in 2008, adapting (with Dunja Gry Jensen) a novel by fellow Gram native Erling Jepsen into the film Terribly Happy. In their youths, Genz and Jepsen had been childhood acquaintances who lived across the street from one another. It won numerous awards, including the Crystal Globe at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.

Henning Carlsen (4 June 1927 – 30 May 2014) was a Danish film director, screenwriter, and producer most noted for his documentaries and his contributions to the style of cinéma vérité. Carlsen's 1966 social-realistic drama Hunger (Sult) was nominated for the Palme d'Or and won the Bodil Award for Best Danish Film. Carlsen also won the Bodil Award the following year for the comedy People Meet and Sweet Music Fills the Heart. Acting as his own producer since 1960, Carlsen has directed more than 25 films, 19 for which he wrote the screenplay. In 2006, he received the Golden Swan Lifetime Achievement Award at the Copenhagen International Film Festival.

Jens Jørgen Thorsen (2 February 1932 Holstebro – 15 November 2000) was a Danish artist, director, and jazz musician whose works sometimes created controversy.
Thorsen began his artistic career attending periodically the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Jens Jørgen Thorsen was part of the Situationist International Movement, in particular his happenings and collaboration with Jørgen Nash are well documented.
Thorsen also wrote, directed, and starred in a number of films, the most notable of them being Quiet Days in Clichy (Stille dage i Clichy,1970), based on the Henry Miller novel.
In painting, Thorsen painted a number of abstract works, which have become increasingly collectible. He also stirred up controversy with a work depicting Jesus in a manner some considered pornographic. Thorsen planned a film called The Many Faces of Jesus, later The Sex Life of Jesus, and was to have involved both heterosexual and homosexual acts. The film plans met with strong national and international protests and accusations of blasphemy resulting in the Danish Film Academy withdrawing its financial support. The film was to have been made in Britain, but it faced intense opposition from Christian morality campaigner Mary Whitehouse, pressure groups, as well as from the Queen, then Prime Minister James Callaghan, the Archbishop of Canterbury Donald Coggan, and Pope Paul VI, who called the film "an insult ... which transforms Christ into sacrilegious bait for filthy falseness". The Return of Jesus (1992) (a completely different project) was made after the ban on the original project was rescinded in 1990. The controversy, and particularly Thorsen's reported interest in producing the film in the United States, led to a decades-long hoax that the release of such a film was imminent.Thorsen was also a jazz musician and co-founder of the group Papa Bue's Viking Jazzband.