Biography
Wim Wenders (born 1945) came to international prominence as one of the pioneers of the New German Cinema in the 1970s and is considered to be one of the most important figures in contemporary German film. In addition to his many prize-winning feature films, his work as a scriptwriter, director, producer, photographer, and author also encompasses an abundance of innovative documentary films, international photo exhibitions, and numerous monographs, film books, and prose collections. He lives and works in Berlin with his wife, Donata Wenders.
Wenders studied medicine and philosophy before moving to Paris in 1966 to study painting. Though ostensibly pursuing an apprenticeship in the studio of the graphic designer and engraver Johnny Friedlaender, he spent his afternoons and evenings in the Cinémathèque française. This “crash course in the history of film” would become the most important stage in his education, as Wenders soon began to think of film as an “extension of painting by other means.”
His career as a filmmaker began in 1967, when Wenders enrolled at the newly founded University of Television and Film Munich (HFF Munich). Parallel to his studies at the HFF, he also worked as a film critic from 1967 to 1970. At this point, he had already directed various short films. Upon graduating from the university in 1971, he, together with fifteen other directors and authors, founded the Filmverlag der Autoren, a distribution company for films by German auteurs, which organized the production, rights administration, and distribution of their own independent films.
After completing his debut feature out of film school, The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (1971), Wenders turned to shooting his road movie trilogy—Alice in the Cities (1974), Wrong Move (1975), and Kings of the Road (1976)—in which the protagonists try to come to terms with their rootlessness in postwar Germany, among other things. His international breakthrough came with The American Friend (1977). Since then, Wenders has continued to work both in Europe and the United States, as well as in Latin America and Asia, and has been honored with numerous awards at festivals around the world, including the Golden Lion in Venice for The State of Things (1982); the Palme d’Or and the British Film Academy Award for Paris, Texas (1984); the Director’s Prize in Cannes for Wings of Desire (1987); and the Silver Bear for The Million Dollar Hotel (2000) at the Berlin International Film Festival. His documentary films Buena Vista Social Club (1999), Pina (2011), and The Salt of the Earth (2014) were all nominated for Oscars. During the 2015 Berlin International Film Festival, Wenders was presented with the Honorary Golden Bear for his lifetime achievement. His most recent feature film, Every Thing Will Be Fine, was shown in the official program of the Berlinale out of competition in 2015.
In the fall of 2012, together with his wife, Donata, Wenders established the Wim Wenders Stiftung in Düsseldorf. The establishment of the foundation was deeply rooted in the intention to create a legally binding framework to bring together the cinematic, photographic, artistic, and literary life’s work of Wenders in his native country and to make it permanently accessible to the public worldwide. At the same time, the nonprofit foundation model serves to ensure that Wenders’s whole body of work may belong only to itself as endowment capital, and that it thus remains beyond the reach of any form of private self-interest. All proceeds from the licensing business are used to finance the central purpose of the foundation: the promotion of the arts and culture through the restoration, dissemination, and preservation of Wenders’s work on the one hand, and through the support of young talents in the field of innovative narrative cinema on the other.
Filmography
FEATURE AND DOCUMENTARY FILMS
1970 Summer in the City
1971 The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick
1972 The Scarlet Letter
1974 Alice in the Cities
1975 Wrong Move
1976 Kings of the Road
1977 The American Friend
1980 Lightning over Water
1982 The State of Things
1982 Hammett
1984 Paris, Texas
1985 Tokyo-ga
1987 Wings of Desire
1989 Notebook on Cities and Clothes
1991 Until the End of the World
1993 Faraway, So Close!
1994 Lisbon Story
1995 Beyond the Clouds (with Michelangelo Antonioni)
1996 A Trick of the Light (with students of the HFF Munich)
1997 The End of Violence
1999 Buena Vista Social Club
2000 The Million Dollar Hotel
2002 Ode to Cologne: A Rock ’n’ Roll Film
2003 The Blues: The Soul of a Man
2004 Land of Plenty
2005 Don’t Come Knocking
2008 Palermo Shooting
2011 Pina (3D)
2013 Cathedrals of Culture: Berlin Philharmonic Hall
2014 The Salt of the Earth
2015 Every Thing Will Be Fine
SHORT FILMS
1967 Schauplätze
1967 Same Player Shoots Again
1968 Silver City Revisited
1968 Police Film
1969 Alabama (2000 Light Years)
1969 3 American LPs
1974 From the Family of Reptiles / The Island
1982 Reverse Angle
1982 Room 666
1992 Arisha, the Bear and the Stone Ring
1998 Willie Nelson at the Teatro
2002 Ten Minutes Older: Twelve Miles to Trona
2007 War in Peace
2007 Los Invisibles: Invisible Crimes
2008 Person to Person: 8
2010 If Buildings Could Talk
2012 Notes from a Day in the Life of an Architect (Peter Zumthor at Work)
