News

The European Film Academy is honoring German filmmaker Wim Wenders with the European Lifetime Achievement Award.

Wenders, who has been nominated for three Oscars and a Grammy, is known for works such as the Road Movie trilogy (1974-1976), Paris, Texas (1984), and Wings of Desire (1987).

“With this award, we celebrate Wim Wenders’ outstanding body of work which keeps exploring and experimenting with a curious eye and an open mind,” said Matthijs Wouter Knol, CEO and director of the European Film Academy. “As one of the founding members of the European Film Academy, its Chairman from 1990 until 1995 and President until 2020, Wim Wenders has a strong connection to the European Film Academy and we’re additionally happy to also celebrate his outstanding commitment and say thank you.”

Wenders began his career as a film critic for various German publications, and was later a founding member of film distributor Filmverlag der Autoren.

In 1975, he...

Bei der Verleihung der European Film Awards am 7. Dezember in Luzern wird Wim Wenders mit dem Lifetime Achievement Award geehrt.

Wim Wenders wird von der European Film Academy für sein Lebenswerk ausgezeichnet (Credit: Donata Wenders)

Bei der Verleihung der European Film Awards am 7. Dezember in Luzern erhält Wim Wenders den European Lifetime Achievement Award. Das teilt die European Film Academy heute mit.

Matthijs Wouter Knol, CEO und geschäftsführender Direktor der European Film Academy erklärt: „Mit dieser Auszeichnung würdigen wir das herausragende Werk von Wim Wenders, der mit neugierigem Blick und offenem Geist immer wieder Neues erforscht und experimentiert. Als eines der Gründungsmitglieder der European Film Academy, als ihr Vorsitzender von 1990 bis 1995 und als Präsident bis 2020 ist Wim Wenders der European Film Academy sehr verbunden, und wir freuen uns, sein herausragendes Engagement zu würdigen und ihm zu danken“.

Wim Wenders, der in seiner Karriere zahlreiche Auszeichnungen, darunter zwei Europäische Filmpreise für...

Sandra Hüller (a Best Actress nominee) and Christian Friedel, stars of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest — nominated for Best Picture, Best International Picture, Director, Sound, and Adapted Screenplay — are familiar with Shakespeare’s famous verse from Hamlet: ”All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women are merely players …” That’s because both thespians have been playing the Danish prince on stages around Germany for years.

Due to Germany’s repertory system in city and state theaters, an actor can revisit an assortment of plays time after time over a number of years.

Friedel tells me that he first played the Dane in 2012. It’s a sort of rock star Hamlet performed with his band, Woods of Birnam. “It can take years until the piece is really finished,” he explains.

He adds that “It changes as you’re getting older,” an experience he feels with movies as well.

The Oscar-contending documentary Anselm marks an encounter between two of the world’s great artists – one renowned for cinema, the other for painting, installations, and sculpture.

The filmmaker, Wim Wenders, began his career more than 50 years ago, with credits that include Paris, Texas, Wings of Desire, Buena Vista Social Club, The Salt of the Earth, and Pina, and two this year alone – Anselm and the narrative feature Perfect Days. His protagonist in Anselm – the German-born artist Anselm Kiefer, may not be as well known among the public as Wenders, but his work stuns in its power, erudition, and scale. Simply put, Kiefer makes art of monumental dimensions.

Anselm Kiefer in ‘Anselm’

“We were in the landscape of his own studio [outside Paris],” Wenders tells Deadline, “this huge depot, bigger than airplane hangars — and several of them.”

Capturing the size of the workspace and the individual artworks, Wenders concluded, called for something different than a standard 2D approach.

Wim Wenders with Lisa Rinzler, his cinematographer for ‪Pope Francis: A Man Of His Word‬ at The Whitby Hotel reception Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

At the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences screening of Wim Wenders' Pope Francis: A Man Of His Word at The Whitby Hotel in midtown Manhattan, the director spoke about how he commandeered Patti Smith into writing a song (These Are The Words) for the documentary and shared her recount of a premonition she voiced to the friars of Assisi.

Wim Wenders with Anne-Katrin Titze on what Pope Francis told him on their first meeting: "I've heard a lot about you. But you have to know, I haven't seen any of your films." Photo: Lisa Rinzler

The reception following the screening was attended by Donata Wenders, Paul Auster, Siri Hustvedt, Lisa Rinzler (Kent Jones's Hitchcock/Truffaut), Tom Farrell, Ulla Zwicker, Annette Insdorf, Kate Davis,...

On the occasion of the 67th Berlin Film Festival, from February 7 to 19, 2017 and as a prologue to the major exhibition Alchemy. The Great Art (6 April — 23 July 2017), the American artist Joe Ramirez presents the world premiere of his project “The Gold Projections” at the Staatliche Museum, Kulturforum, Exhibit Hall (just across from Potsdamer Platz on Postdamer Strasse).Joe Ramirez “Somnium” Video still, 2016 © Joe Ramirez

Joe Ramirez, who was born in San Francisco in 1958, has lived and worked in Berlin since 2007. He studied painting and film at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as sculpture at the Royal College of Art, London, before working as a fresco painter. During the restoration of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, Ramirez had the unique opportunity of viewing Michelangelo’s ceiling paintings up close. The journey in the hoist became an initialising experience: the scenes from The Last Judgement rolled past...

Wim Wenders with Anne-Katrin Titze Photo: Claire Brunel

The director of recent documentaries Pina on the late great choreographer poet Pina Bausch and the Oscar nominated The Salt Of The Earth with Juliano Ribeiro Salgado on master photographer Sebastião Salgado, is in New York for Wim Wenders: Portraits Along The Road, the first stop for a major retrospective of his films. Wenders has many long-term collaborations along the way including Peter Handke and Nick Cave who will appear with Reda Kateb (great in David Oelhoffen's Albert Camus adaptation, Far From Men, opposite Viggo Mortensen) and Sophie Semin in his latest film, The Beautiful Days Of Aranjuez (Les Beaux Jours D’Aranjuez).

We also talked about how in Nanni Moretti's Mia Madre the poster of Wings Of Desire made it into a dream sequence and Wim's Film4Climate involvement.

In the elevator on my way to meet Wim,...

Very few movements in film history have been as rewarding, and yet as undervalued among film fans, as that of the New German Cinema. With names like Rainer Werner Fassbinder now beginning to be muttered in broad collections of film fans, the world of German filmmaking that came to light in the late 1960s has birthed some of the greatest auteurs of its generation, even a handful that are still turning out some of their best work. Most notably filmmakers like Werner Herzog have transitioned from this movement into worlds that they themselves have broken the ground on.

Same could be said for one Wim Wenders.

Best known for masterpieces like Wings Of Desire and Paris, Texas, the filmmaker is to this day pushing the boundaries of what cinema can do. With 3D films like Pina and his startlingly poignant Salt Of The Earth, Wenders has had a more than productive career spanning 5 decades,...

Chicago – Wim Wenders has entertained audiences for over 40 years with his wide range of film subjects, both in narrative and documentary form. His latest film is the delicate and emotionally charged ‘Pina,’ an overview and exposition of his friend, the famous German choreographer Pina Bausch.

Born in Düsselforf, Wenders came upon film after dropping out of university in the mid-1960s. After moving in Paris to try his hand as a painter and engraver, he became fascinated with film, seeing up to five a day at the local cinemas. He returned to Germany and enrolled in the University of Television and Film Munich, and became a film critic for several publications. He became part of the New German Cinema movement at the end of the 1960s, and made his feature directorial debut with “Summer in the City” (1970).

Dancers in a Modern Setting in ‘Pina’

Photo credit: Donata Wenders for IFC Films...

Chicago – Director Wim Wenders, famous for his magical takes on life and love in “Wings of Desire” and “Until the End of the World,” brings that same enchantment through a 3-D documentary about a rebellious and unusual German choreographer named Pina Bausch in “Pina.”

Rating: 3.5/5.0

The film is hypnotizing and mesmerizing, more so for aficionados of the dance. Pina Bausch (now deceased) was a visionary in the use of organic elements and movement designed around those elements. The dancers work their activities within the framework, and create stage/screen pictures of uncompromising distinction. The 3-D work enhances these works, but not so much to make it necessary. What is on-screen is a tribute from one old friend to another, and it succeeds in that wonderful energy.

Pina Bausch was a practitioner of the Tanztheater, which means dance theater. Throughout the documentary, her works are performed, and then commented upon by...

Ensemble of Pina/Credit: Donata Wenders Jacob Wilson, a student at Tribeca Flashpoint Media Arts Academy, recently sat down with renowned writer/director Wim Wenders to discuss his new film, Pina. Thanks to a dual partnership with IFC Films and the Chicago International Film Festival, Wilson produced and edited an interview with the German experimental fillmmaker where they cracked jokes, discussed Pina, and covered how Wenders would like "to change the minds of people who think dance is not for them." As I was handed my 3D glasses for the screening of Wim Wenders' new film Pina, I noticed that the theater was practically empty. The Chicago International Film Festival put on this screening just for press, so the lack of fellow patrons should be unsurprising. I was nonetheless left to ponder the circumstance. Any other movie made in 3D would probably pack the house, given the mainstream appeal...