Joachim Trier Biography

Joachim Trier is a Danish-Norwegian filmmaker acclaimed for intimate, character-driven dramas that explore love, memory, ambition, and identity, and for putting contemporary Oslo firmly on the international cinema map. He has received major festival honors, including the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, and multiple nominations from the Academy Awards, Golden Globes, BAFTA, and César Awards.

Joachim Trier was born in Copenhagen to Norwegian parents and grew up in Oslo in a film-industry family: his father, Jacob Trier, worked as a sound technician and his grandfather, Erik Løchen, was an experimental filmmaker and studio artistic director. A former skateboarding champion, Trier first honed his visual style by shooting skate videos before studying film at the European Film College in Denmark and later at the UK's National Film and Television School.

Trier began his career making short films, including Pietà (2000), Still (2001), and Procter (2002), which established his interest in psychological tension and subjective experience. His feature debut Reprise (2006), about two aspiring writers in Oslo, premiered to strong critical acclaim, winning Norway's top Amanda Awards along with international festival prizes in Toronto and other cities.

Trier is best known for his so-called Oslo trilogy: Reprise (2006), Oslo, 31 August (2011), and The Worst Person in the World (2021), all co-written with Eskil Vogt and featuring actor Anders Danielsen Lie. These films, which follow educated urban characters wrestling with existential crises, earned him a global art-house following and culminated in Oscar nominations for Best Original Screenplay and Best International Feature for The Worst Person in the World.

Outside the trilogy, Trier directed his first English-language feature Louder Than Bombs (2015), a family drama starring Gabriel Byrne, Isabelle Huppert, and Jesse Eisenberg that premiered in Competition at Cannes. He followed with the supernatural coming-of-age thriller Thelma (2017), Norway’s submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and later the documentary The Other Munch (2018) and the family drama Sentimental Value (2025), which won the Grand Prix at Cannes. The film also received an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture and Trier received a nomination in the Best Director category.

Trier frequently collaborates with co-writer Eskil Vogt and a close-knit creative team, and his films often return to motifs of memory, regret, and the passage of time within contemporary urban life. Widely regarded as one of Scandinavia’s leading auteurs, he is the most-awarded director in the history of Norway's Amanda Awards and continues to influence a new generation of filmmakers drawn to personal, emotionally precise storytelling.