Jorgen Leth is a director, journalist, author, and cycling commentator. In his youth, he was an active cyclist and table-tennis player. Leth studied literature at Aarhus University and ethnography at Copenhagen University. Leth made his first film in 1963, Stop for Bud, a documentary portrait of jazz pianist Bud Powell, and he became a central figure on the experimental documentary film scene in the 1960s. Leth tends to highlight the mythological and epic aspects of his subjects. This is most apparent in his sports films, including Stars and the Water Carriers (1974) and A Sunday in Hell (1977), about two cycling races: the Giro d’Italia and the Paris-Roubaix spring classic, respectively. In 2003, Leth co-directed The Five Obstructions with Lars von Trier. The film presents five remakes of Leth’s 1968 classic, The Perfect Human.