Wim Wenders

Sebastião Salgado spent forty years photographing war and famine, until he stopped and turned his attention to the Earth itself. Wim Wenders follows this remarkable artist and activist in an Oscar-nominated documentary. What is left of a person after decades of pointing a lens at suffering? — For four decades the photographer Sebastião Salgado has witnessed and recorded the great events of modern history, working through wars, famines and mass exoduses of refugees. He still travels the world, but these days he’s looking for places nobody has touched, for wild animals and for landscapes that haven’t yet been destroyed. What he photographs now is what remains. — Nominated for Best Documentary | Oscars | 2015 Prize of the Ecumenical Jury - Special Mention | Cannes Film Festival | 2014 Special Jury Prize - Un Certain Regard | Cannes Film Festival | 2014 Audience Award | San Sebastián Film Festival | 2014

Wim Wenders won Best Director at Cannes for this much-loved film, in which two angels hover over a still-divided Berlin and envy people the unpredictability of their lives. Then one of them, Bruno Ganz in an iconic role, decides to become human, with none other than Peter Falk in support. — The guardian angels who roam a divided Berlin see the world in black and white, listening in on the thoughts of mortals and trying to bring them some comfort. Then one of them falls in love with an acrobat, and if he wants to be with her, he will have to give up his immortality. — Official Selection | Cannes Film Festival | 1987 Best Director | Cannes Film Festival | 1987 Audience Award | São Paulo International Film Festival | 1988

Wim Wenders’ Oscar-nominated documentary follows Cuban musicians, some of them over eighty, who were almost unknown outside their country and whose band is now famous the world over. After more than an hour and a half of traditional Havana music, you’ll still be calling for an encore. — In 1996 Ry Cooder recorded an album in Havana, almost by chance, with a group of veteran Cuban musicians named after a long-closed social club. Two years later he comes back to make a solo record with Ibrahim Ferrer, one of those same musicians, and the music starts. In April the band plays two concerts in Amsterdam, and by July it is stepping onto the famous stage of Carnegie Hall. — Nominated for Best Documentary | Oscars | 2000 Best European Documentary | European Film Awards | 1999

A silent man walks out of the Texas desert in search of his wife in the cult road movie that Wim Wenders began shooting with only half a script, and which went on to win the Palme d’Or. It’s a portrait of a lonely America, where Nastassja Kinski in a pink sweater stands for something we’ve all lost. — Silent and apparently without a memory, a man wanders through Texas in punishing heat until he is found unconscious in the desert. His brother, who gave him up for dead years ago, takes him home to the boy he and his wife have been raising, the man’s own son. He won’t say where he has been all this time, and all he wants is to find his wife and take the boy with him. — FIPRESCI Prize | Cannes Film Festival | 1984 Palme d'Or | Cannes Film Festival | 1984 Prize of the Ecumenical Jury | Cannes Film Festival | 1984

Gabriel Byrne, Bill Pullman and Andie MacDowell star in the cult film in which Wim Wenders saw the years of surveillance and dwindling privacy coming. Somewhere in Los Angeles, a former NASA employee sits in a room, watching the whole city through a network of hidden cameras. — A Los Angeles producer who got rich on brutal, blood-drenched films finds himself in the hands of people for whom violence is anything but fiction. Across town, a government employee sits in a room full of monitors, seeing everything through a secret camera network, and slowly works out what it is really for. He starts asking too many questions, and soon he’s the one being watched. — Official Selection | Cannes Film Festival | 1997 Best Director | German Film Awards | 1998

Lisbon asked Wim Wenders for a film to mark its year as European Capital of Culture, and he made a melancholy story that smells of the sea and celebrates the sounds of the city. Manoel de Oliveira, a legend of Portuguese cinema, explains what cinema is for, while Madredeus play fado. Just listen. — A postcard from Lisbon reaches a German sound engineer: come, I’m making a film here and I need sound. So Philip Winter sets off, only to find a flat full of film cans and no sign of the director, Friedrich, and nobody can tell him when he’ll be back. Rather than wait, Winter picks up his boom mic and heads out to record the city. — Nominated for Un Certain Regard Prize | Cannes Film Festival | 1995

The dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch was meant to be the subject of this film, but she died before Wim Wenders could start shooting. So he made it not with her but for her: a tribute in four choreographies to a woman who said that we must dance, dance, or else we are lost. — The dancers of Pina Bausch’s company perform her work. They dance “The Rite of Spring” on a stage covered in earth and “Café Müller” among rows of wooden chairs, while in “Vollmond” water floods the boards. Then they carry these pieces out into the city, into its parks and under its railway. — Nominated for Best Documentary | Oscars | 2012 Best European Documentary | European Film Awards | 2011