Cannes Bans Director von Trier for Hitler Comments

The controversial Danish filmmaker's joke about relating to Hitler offended even more people than his 2009 film 'Antichrist.'

Danish director Lars von Trier has been banned from the Cannes Film Festival for rambling comments he made that were somewhat sympathetic to, you guessed it, Adolf Hitler. Von Trier, who won the Cannes' Palme d'Or prize in 2000 for his film Dancer in the Dark, was at the French festival promoting his new film Melancholia when he responded to a question by jokingly calling himself a Nazi, and then said he “understands” Hitler and where the German dictator's mindset would have been in his final days spent holed up in a bunker. Von Trier backtracked afterward and said he was only kidding when he made the comments, but the festival's board, in an emergency meeting, declared von Trier a “persona non grata.”