Later joined by Kristian Levring and Kragh-Jacobsen, the group called for a new "chastity", to put their films "into uniform, because the individual film will be decadent by definition".

Films, they declared, should be made on location with no sets, props and lighting; and with no genre, no superficial action and no optical work. They should be made with a handheld camera, real-time sound and music and in Academy 35mm colour.

"The French New Wave gave fresh air. And in the same way Dogma 95 has been designed to give fresh air, to regain lost innocence," declared the group, which saw it as "a rescue operation to counter certain tendencies in film today… opposing the auteur concept, make-up, illusions and 'dramaturgical' predictability… to purge film so that once again the inner lives of the characters justifies the plot."

"When we were playing around with the idea, I found it extremely inspiring - limitations have always been a major source of inspiration," said Vinterberg, the director of Festen. But the new chastity has been contested by the directors themselves. Vinterberg and von Trier have both admitted to breaking their own rules already. And, as Richard Falcon observed in Sight and Sound: "Dogma 95 mimics a revolutionary stance that pretends to want to revive a modernist transgressive cinema within a sceptical postmodern climate. The game is roundly given away, though, when it talks about doing this at the cost of 'any good taste'." Jørn Rossing Jensen