Asger Leth was born in Copenhagen, Denmark,1970. He was born into a filmmaking family as the son of film-editor Ann Bierlich and renowned filmdirector Jorgen Leth.

Asger Leth grew up with film as a way of life. His father is Danish film giant Jørgen Leth; the younger Leth has appeared in a number of his father's documentaries, and was a writer and assistant director on the Five Obstructions (2003), in which Lars von Trier challenged Leth Sr. to remake one of his films five times. Ghosts of Cité Soleil is Asger Leth's first film.

Asger's childhood house was doubling as a production company with a film-editing suite and adjacent cinema in the basement, a messy production office next to the kitchen and creative people running in an out of the door at all times.

Among Asger' s siblings he counts an actor, an actress, a photographer, a musician, a writer and a film producer.Strangely divided between only two brothers and two sisters.

Asger spent his school-years evenly divided between actually looking at books and travelling the world on film-productions which his parents considered better education.

In a wild spree of rebellion against his upbringing, Asger decided to go to law school and stuck it out for three years, while paying his rent working on tv-productions and commercials in every thinkable job description. When work became more interesting and law too boring, Asger burned his books and has not looked back since.

After working for ten years in tv, commercials and filmproduction, while making a couple of shorts on the side and slowly refining his taste, Asger second unit directed, shot and wrote segments for the acclaimed film by Lars von Trier and Jorgen Leth - The Five Obstructions.

Soon after, suffering the usual post-divorce depression, Asger finally decided to take a chance and gambled his life and all the money he didn't have and went to Haiti with all the broken down gear he could carry.

The result is the feature lenght documentary Ghosts of Cite Soleil.