The Idiots

“Take a long ride on the short bus.”

In a rented house outside Copenhagen, a group of young adults moves in together and calls themselves idiots. Stoffer (Jens Albinus) leads them into restaurants and public places, where they drool and stammer and pass as mentally disabled, and the strangers around them have to decide how to react. Lars von Trier shot it on handheld digital cameras under the Dogme 95 rules, and the film keeps asking what it costs to give up the ordinary self.