Catherine Deneuve, David Morse, Cara Seymour, Peter Stormare, Siobhan Fallon Hogan and Joel Grey also star.

Dancer in the Dark is the third and final installment in von Trier's second trilogy "Golden Heart", following Breaking the Waves (1996) and The Idiots (1998).

[10] Dancer in the Dark premiered at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival and won the Palme d'Or, along with the Best Actress Award for Björk.

Selma is gradually losing her vision due to a degenerative eye condition, but still is saving money to pay for an operation that will prevent Gene from sharing her fate.

Bill reveals to Selma that Linda's excessive spending has put the couple's house in danger of foreclosure by their bank.

The next day, Selma's boss Norman believes that her eye condition has deteriorated; he accepts her resignation and pays her final wages, but promises to re-hire her once her sight has improved.

Selma shoots Bill several times, but only wounds him further due to her poor vision, and finally beats him to death with her safe deposit box once the gun runs out of ammunition.

She imagines that Bill's corpse stands up and slow dances with her, and he and Linda absolve her of blame and tell her she just did what she had to do ("Smith & Wesson").

Not knowing about the murder, Jeff takes Selma to rehearsal, where her director calls the police to have her arrested ("In the Musicals, Part 1").

When her claim of sending all her money to her father in Czechoslovakia is proven false, she is convicted of murder and sentenced to death ("In the Musicals, Part 2").

Kathy and Jeff eventually figure out what happened and recover Selma's money, using it instead to pay for a trial lawyer who can free her.

Selma refuses the lawyer, opting to face execution by hanging rather than let her son go blind, but she is deeply distraught as she awaits her death ("107 Steps").

[17] A Danish MY class locomotive and one T43 (both owned by Swedish train operator TÅGAB) were painted in the American Great Northern scheme for the film, and not repainted afterward.

The album features classical arrangements, as well as melodies and beats composed of sounds from mundane objects, such as factory machines and trains.

Some lyrics were rewritten, perhaps to prevent spoiling crucial plot details, since the soundtrack was released in stores before the movie opened in theaters, or to make the record flow better as a stand-alone album.

[21] She commented: It was extremely clear to me when I walked into the actresses profession that my humiliation and role as a lesser sexually harassed being was the norm and set in stone with the director and a staff of dozens who enabled it and encouraged it.

When I turned the director down repeatedly he sulked and punished me and created for his team an impressive net of illusion where I was framed as the difficult one.

[23] Von Trier has rejected Björk's allegation that he sexually harassed her during the making of the film Dancer in the Dark, and said "That was not the case.

[24][25] Peter Aalbæk Jensen, the producer of Dancer in the Dark, told Jyllands-Posten that "as far as I remember we [Lars von Trier and I] were the victims.

I have read the lies written by Lars and his producer Peter about Björk – and feel compelled to speak out and put the record straight.

This was a result of the directors ongoing, disrespectful verbal and physical abuse which continued after both Björk and myself demanded that he stop behaving this way.

I feel compelled to publicly speak out in fierce support of Björk in regards to her terrible experiences working with Lars Von Trier, and I back what she has said 110%.The Guardian later found that Jensen's studio, Zentropa, with which von Trier frequently collaborated, had an endemic culture of sexual harassment.

The critics consensus on the website reads, "Dancer in Dark can be grim, dull, and difficult to watch, but even so, it has a powerful and moving performance from Björk and is something quite new and visionary".

[37] Edward Guthmann from the San Francisco Chronicle wrote: "It's great to see a movie so courageous and affecting, so committed to its own differentness".

Jonathan Foreman of the New York Post described the film as "meretricious fakery" and called it "so unrelenting in its manipulative sentimentality that, if it had been made by an American and shot in a more conventional manner, it would be seen as a bad joke".