Susanne Bier

Though Academy Award-winning writer and director Susanne Bier’s films often play out against wide-reaching global backdrops, 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.

Her film In a Better World won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film as well as an Italian Golden Globe Award for Best European Film and Best Director at the European Film Awards. Prior to this, as a writer/director she had helmed the multi-award-winning After the Wedding, which was also an Academy Award nominee for Best Foreign Language Film, and Brothers, which won, among others, the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival and at the Boston Independent Film Festival.  Additional feature film credits include: Things We Lost in the Fire, starring Halle Berry and Benicio Del Toro, her first English-language film, Love Is All You Need, starring Pierce Brosnan and Trine Dyrholm, Serena starring Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper, and A Second Chance, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. Her debut feature film The One and Only 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. She is the first female director to win an Academy Award, a Golden Globe, an Emmy, and a European Film Award, collectively.

Bier made her foray into American prestige television with the six-part mini-series, The Night Manager, starring Tom Hiddleston and Hugh Laurie, based on the 1993 novel of the same name by John le Carré. Bier’s post-apocalyptic thriller Bird Box starring Sandra Bullock premiered on Netflix and in theaters to critical and popular acclaim.

Bier’s mini-series The Undoing for HBO based on the novel You Should Have Known stars Nicole Kidman, Hugh Grant, Donald Sutherland and Edgar Rameriez. The series became one of the most talked about shows upon its release on HBO. The show is created by David E. Kelley (Big Little Lies) with Bier directing all six episodes. Her most recent anthology series First Lady with Showtime stars Viola Davis, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Gillian Anderson, and follows the stories of some of America’s most formidable first ladies. Bier recently received the European Achievement in World Cinema Award from the European Film Academy.