A man wanders out of the desert not knowing who he is. His brother finds him, and helps to pull his memory back of the life he led before he walked out on his family and disappeared four years earlier.
Two angels, Damiel and Cassiel, glide through the streets of Berlin, observing the bustling population, providing invisible rays of hope to the distressed but never interacting with them. When Damiel falls in love with lonely trapeze artist Marion, the angel longs to experience life in the physical world, and finds -- with some words of wisdom from actor Peter Falk -- that it might be possible for him to take human form.
The Million Dollar Hotel starts with a jump from a roof top that clears up a death in a hotel that was burning to the ground where a lot of strange people had been living.
German director Wim Wenders made this documentary in which he tries to explore the Tokyo that was depicted in the films of Yasujiro Ozu. When Wenders visits Tokyo for the first time, he finds a very different city, one with a booming fascination with technology that often clashes with the traditional elements of Japanese culture. Wenders also interviews Ozu's cinematographer, Yuharu Atsuta, and Chishu Ryu, an actor who frequently collaborated with Ozu.
Lisbon Story is Wim Wenders' homage to Lisbon and films. A sound engineer obtains a mysterious postcard from a friend who at the moment is filming a film in Lisbon. He sets out across Europe to find him and help him.
Six days in the life of Wilhelm: a detached man without qualities. He wants to write, so his mother gives him a ticket to Bonn, telling him to live. On the train he meets an older man, an athlete in the 1936 Olympics, and his mute teen companion, Mignon. She's an acrobat in market squares for spare change.
In 1999, a woman's life is forever changed after she survives a car crash with two bank robbers, who enlist her help to take the money to a drop in Paris. On the way, she runs into another fugitive from the law — an American doctor on the run from the CIA. They want to confiscate his father's invention – a device which allows anyone to record their dreams and visions.
In this fascinating Oscar-nominated documentary, American guitarist Ry Cooder brings together a group of legendary Cuban folk musicians (some in their 90s) to record a Grammy-winning CD in their native city of Havana. The result is a spectacular compilation of concert footage from the group's gigs in Amsterdam and New York City's famed Carnegie Hall, with director Wim Wenders capturing not only the music -- but also the musicians' life stories.
Itinerant projection-equipment repairman Bruno Winter and depressed hitchhiker Robert Lander - a doctor who has just been through a break-up with his wife and a half-hearted suicide attempt - travel along the Western side of the East-German border in a repair truck, visiting worn-out movie theaters, learning to communicate across their differences.
During the 1982 Cannes Film Festival, Wenders asks a number of global film directors to, one at a time, go into a hotel room, turn on the camera and answer a simple question: "What is the future of cinema?"
Goalkeeper Josef Bloch is sent off after committing a foul during an away game. This causes him to lose his bearings, and he wanders aimlessly through the city streets and spends the night with the box-office attendant of a movie theatre.
A rare gem of cinematic storytelling that weaves docudrama, fictional reenactment, and experimental photography into a powerful, reflective work on the early days of German cinema. The film tells the story of the Skladanowsky Brothers, the German-born duo responsible for inventing the "bioskop", an early version of the film projector.
New times have come for the way demonstrations are handled by the police. No more crude repression... "Policemen come from the people, just as demonstrators". Therefore, if you're a cop, now it's a matter of "convincing" your "comrade" who's demonstrating to forget about it.
After an extensive prison term, a free man wanders into a new reality.
Documentary about the efforts to preserve and restore the films of German director Wim Wenders.
Another short was 3 American LPs, which was the first film I did with Peter Handke. It was a film about American music, about three pieces of three LPs. There was a song by Van Morrison, another by Harvey Mandel, and one of Credence Clearwater Revival. It was mainly the music and some shots out of a car, landscapes out of the car window. And it had a little bit of commentary – dialogue between Peter and me about American music and about how American rock music was about emotion and images instead of sounds. That is to say, about a kind of phenomenon, that it was in a way a kind of film music, but without a moving picture. It was a 12-minute film and it was never shown. – Wim Wenders
Wim Wenders's atmospheric testimony about the problems he encountered while working on HAMMET(1982) with Francis Ford Coppola, and the differences between the film-making process in Europe and the States.
Sequence of five shots, each one with a particular color treatment, in which a man carrying a machine gun runs. He moves fast in the beginning but, as the end comes closer, he starts to walk in zigzag. Is he hurt?
"The film starts with a shot of a cassette recorder, and it has a juke box in it. There’s always music in it. When I was asked by some critics at a festival press conference what the film was all about, I said 'it’s about the song All Along The Watchtower, and the film is about what happens and what changes depending on whether the song is sung by Bob Dylan or by Jimi Hendrix.'" Well, both versions of the song appear in the film, and everybody thought I was pretty arrogant to explain the story this way. But the film really is about the difference between the Dylan version of All Along the Watchtower, and the Jimi Hendrix Version. One is at the beginning and one is at the end." – Wim Wenders