Anders Thomas Jensen (born 6 April 1972) is a Danish screenwriter and film director. His film Election Night won the 1998 Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film.
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Early life and education
Anders Thomas Jensen was born on 6 April 1972 was born in Frederiksværk, Denmark.
Career
Jensen won the Oscar for Best Short Subject for his 1998 film Election Night. He received Oscar nominations in the live-action short category for his films Ernst & Lyset (1996) and Wolfgang (1997). He also wrote the script for After the Wedding which was nominated for an Oscar as Best Foreign film in 2007, The New Tenants, which won the 2009 Oscar for Best Live Action Short and In a Better World which won the Oscar for Best Foreign film in 2011 and the Golden Globe for Best Foreign film.
From the end of the 1990s and into the new millennium he wrote the screenplays for most of the Danish movie blockbusters of the period, including Mifune's Last Song (co-written with Søren Kragh-Jacobsen), In China They Eat Dogs, Open Hearts, Stealing Rembrandt, and Brothers.
In 2000 Anders Thomas Jensen for the first time directed a feature film: the action-comedy Flickering Lights, and since then directed The Green Butchers, Adam's Apples, Men & Chicken, Riders of Justice, and The Last Viking.
Jensen co-wrote the film The Dark Tower with Nikolaj Arcel, Akiva Goldsman, and Jeff Pinkner, based on the Stephen King series. It was Jensen's first work on an American screenplay.
Recognition and awards
American film theorist and film historian David Bordwell wrote in a 2007 article: "we can now speak of the Jensen touch -- a twinge of pathos acknowledged quietly, relying on our sympathy for the characters' bizarre frailties".
In 2024, Jensen was awarded the Ballings Særpris (Special Prize) at the Isbjørnen, by Nordisk Film Foundation. The prize commemorated the 100th birthday of Danish filmmaker Erik Balling.
Personal life
Jensen married actress Line Kruse in 2008.