Walking out on to her winter wonderland stage, Lone Scherfig opened her David Lean Lecture with an excerpt of the ‘ice palace’ scene from Dr Zhivago (1965). A fitting tribute to both the set she had conjured up for her lecture and her love of filmmaking.

For Scherfig, David Lean’s Dr Zhivago exemplifies the purity and generosity that can exist in filmmaking, the ‘cinematic vocabulary’ which Lean created allowed him to tell the story ‘in a way that it couldn’t have been communicated had it not been for film’.

Growing up in Denmark in the 60’s and 70’s under a social democratic government, Lone learnt first-hand about the importance of generosity. Her parents would frequently take in ‘young, starving ballerinas’ and ‘people [her] parents wanted to take care of’. She was taught to ‘never show off and never think you’re better than anyone’. It was perhaps these values that drew her to her contemporaries in the Dogme 95 cinematic movement spearheaded by Lars Von Trier which excluded the use of elaborate effects or technology, preferring instead to focus on storytelling and the actors’ performances.

“One of the most important things I can tell students is to find their voice as directors, to define what it is that they can do that no one else can.” – Lone Scherfig

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