Wim Wenders
Date of Birth: 14 Aug 1945
Country: Germany
Biography: Wenders graduated from the Gymnasium (high school) in Oberhausen, in the Ruhr area. He then studied medicine (1963-64) and philosophy (1964-65) in Freiburg and Düsseldorf. However, he dropped out of school and moved to Paris in October 1966 to become a painter. Wenders failed his entry test at France's national film school IDHEC (La Fémis at present), so instead became an engraver in the studio of Johnny Friedlander, an American artist, in Montparnasse. During this time, Wenders became fascinated with cinema, and saw up to 5 movies a day at the local movie theater.
Total Credits at Criticker: 22 (Actor), 55 (Director), 33 (Writer)
Find more information about Wim Wenders at The Internet Movie Database
Titles you haven't rated - Actor (22) | Director (55) | Writer (33)
Made of four short tales, linked by a story filmed by Wim Wenders. Taking place in Ferrara, Portofino, Aix en Provence and Paris, each story, which always a woman as the crux of the story, invites to an inner travel, as Antonioni says "towards the true image of that absolute and mysterious reality that nobody will ever see". (imdb)
This ground-breaking documentary, inspired by the album, includes appearances by legendary performers Ry & Joaquim Cooder, Ibrahim Ferrer, Ruben Gonzáles, Eliades Ochoa, Omara Portuondo, Compay Segundo and many other renowned Cuban Musicians. (Artisan Entertainment)
Focusing on a gang of unique outcasts and misfits living in a downtown Los Angeles fleapit, this is a story of friendship, betrayal and the overwhelming power of unconditional love. (Icon/Road Movies)
Wim Wenders directed this enchanting fantasy about an angel who, while wandering unseen through West Berlin, falls in love with a beautiful circus performer and decides to become human. (MGM)
Howard Spence (Sam Shepard) has seen better days. Once a big Western movie star, he now drowns his disgust for his selfish and failed life with alcohol, drugs and young women. If he were to die now, nobody would shed a tear over him, that's the sad truth. Until one day Howard learns that he might have a child somewhere out there. The very idea seems like a ray of hope that his life wasn't all in vain. So he sets out to find that young man or woman. He discovers an entire life that he has missed ... (imdb)
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 wife and son four years before. (imdb)
When he receives a cryptic call from his filmmaker friend to come to Lisbon to help with a project, a sound engineer sets off for the Portuguese capital. Upon arrival, the confused sound man finds only an unfinished film and the splendors of the city.
A goalkeeper Josef Bloch is ejected during a game for foul play. He leaves the field and goes to spend the night with a cinema cashier. He then proceeds to strangle her the morning after. (imdb)
Jonathan Zimmermann, a picture framer in Hamburg is diagnosed as having leukemia. Ripley, an American art dealer who deals in forgeries... (imdb)
Set in 1999, a woman (Dommartin) has a car accident with some bank robbers, who befriend and enlist her help to take the money to a drop in Paris... (imdb)
Mike Max is a Hollywood producer who became powerful and rich thanks to brutal and bloody action films... (imdb)
A traveling projection-equipment mechanic travels in Western Germany along the East-German border, visiting worn-out film-theatres. meets up with a depressed young man whose marriage has just broken up, and the two decide to travel together. (imdb)
A sequel to Wender's Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of desire), it again follows a group of angels in the German capital who look longingly upon the life of humans. (imdb)
The novel writter Dashiell Hammett is involved in the investigation of the mysterious disappearance of a beautiful chinese cabaret actress in San Francisco. (imdb)
In "The Soul of A Man," director Wim Wenders looks at the dramatic tension in the blues between the sacred and the profane by exploring the music and lives of three of his favorite blues artists: Skip James, Blind Willie Johnson and J. B. Lenoir. (wim-wenders.com)
German journalist Philip Winter has a case of writer's block when trying to write an article about the United States. He decides to return to Germany, and while trying to book a flight, encounters a German woman and her nine year old daughter Alice doing the same... (imdb)
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. (imdb)
On location in Portugal, a film crew runs out of film while making their own version of Roger Corman's The Day the World Ended. The producer is nowhere to be found and director Munro attempts to find him in hopes of being able to finish the film. (imdb)
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... (imdb)
Director Nicholas Ray is eager to complete a final film before his imminent death from cancer. Wim Wenders is working on his own film _Hammett (1983)_ in Hollywood, but flies to New York to help Ray realize his final wish. Ray's original intent is to make a fiction film about a dying painter who sails to China to find a cure for his disease. He and Wenders discuss this idea, but it is obviously unrealistic given Ray's state of health. (imdb)
In 17th-century Salem, Hester Prynne must wear a scarlet A because she is an adulteress, with a child out of wedlock. For seven years, she has refused to name the father. A vigorous older stranger arrives, recognized by Hester but unknown to others as her missing husband... (imdb)
Room 666 (1982) - TV Movie
During the 1982 Cannes Film Festival, Wenders asks a number of film directors from around the world to get, each one at a time, into a hotel room, turn on the camera and sound recorder, and, in solitude, answer a simple question: "What is the future of cinema?". (imdb)
Wim Wenders talks with Japanese fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto about the creative process and ponders the relationship between cities, identity and the cinema in the digital age. (imdb)
Moved by the work of director Yasujiro Ozu, Wim Wenders travels to Japan in search of the Tokyo seen in his films. (imdb)
Follows a hotshot German photographer from Berlin who comes to Palermo because he needs to make a clean break from his past. In the city he meets a young woman and a completely different way of life. (movies.yahoo.com)
8 shorts centered around 8 themes directed by 8 famous film directors involved and sharing their opinion on progress, on the set-backs and the challenges our planet faces today.
Prison discharges Hans into a freedom as inhospitable as the winter weather. As a stranger, he strays in familiar streets, bars, flies to a friend in Berlin. (wim-wenders.com)
A documentary and performance film about the late German contemporary choreographer, Pina Bausch.
Documentary about the rock group BAP from Cologne in Germany. (imdb)
Same Player Shoots Again (1968) - Short Film
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? (imdb)
Alabama: 2000 Light Years from Home (1969) - Short Film
Because the driver is unable to fulfill correctly his order to kill somebody, he and his friends have to pay the price. "Alabama" is a road-movie. The camera is constantly in the back of the car shooting through the back window... But more important than this story is how the song "All Along the Watchtower" by Bob Dylan is changing when it is interpreted by Jimi Hendrix. And the recurring album of the Stones "His Satanic Majesty's Request". (imdb)
During the last forty years, the photographer Sebastião Salgado has been travelling through the continents, in the footsteps of an ever-changing humanity. He has witnessed the major events of our recent history and is now embarking on a huge photographic project which is a tribute to the planet's beauty. Sebastião's Salgado's life and work are revealed to us by his son, Juliano, who went with him during his last journeys, and by Wim Wenders, a photographer himself. (festival-cannes.com)
One day, driving aimlessly around the outskirts of town after a trivial domestic quarrel, a writer named Tomas accidentally hits and kills a child. Will he be able to move on? (imdb)
3 American LPs (1969) - TV Special
There are certain image-evoking songs that are more visual than most movies nowadays. Here, Wenders combines sights filmed in Germany from inside a car with music that inspires American landscapes. Meanwhile, Wenders and Peter Handke discuss American music. (Jose Antonio Martinez-Dacal)
Polizeifilm (1969) - TV Special
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. (Jose Antonio Martinez-Dacal)
Reverse Angle: Ein Brief aus New York (1985) - Short Film
1982. West Germany. "Reverse Angle was my first diary film. It is about 'new wave music' (among others, Jim Jarmusch's Del-Byzanteens), about straying in New York, about the editing process of Hammett in the presence of Francis Ford Coppola, about a novel by Emmanuel Bove, and about Edward Hopper. And somehow, the whole thing was a reflection about filmmaking in Europe and America" (Wenders). In German, English; English subtitles. 17 min. (Wim Wenders)
Silver City Revisited (1968) - Short Film
"I was very impressed by the views from the different apartments in which I lived as a student in Munich. And I had a postcard collection. And in the attic of the film school I found a collection of old 78 Shellac records and numbered them consecutively with the same title: MOOD MUSIC. A recording mix did not happen. With the 16mm projector of the film school, I recorded them directly onto the audio track by rule of thumb." (Wim Wenders)
Set in the modern day in beautiful spanish city, Aranjuez, 'The Beautiful...' unveils a story about moral conflicts and sex spirals in distanced familiar and loving relationships. (imdb)
In a room with no windows on the eastern coast of Africa, an Englishman, James Moore, is held captive by jihadist fighters. Thousands of miles away in the Greenland Sea, Danielle Flinders prepares to dive in a submersible to the ocean floor. In their confines they are drawn back to the Christmas of the previous year, where a chance encounter on a beach in France led to an intense and enduring romance. (imdb)
Pope Francis travels the world speaking to those in need and delivering a message of hope. (imdb)
U2: Night and Day (1990) - Direct-to-Video
A promotional video for U2's 1990 single "Night and Day." (imdb)
U2: Stay (Faraway, So Close!) (1993) - Direct-to-Video
A promotional video for U2's 1993 single "Stay (Faraway, So Close!)" (imdb)
Talking Heads: Sax and Violins (1992) - Direct-to-Video
Music video for Sax and Violins from Talking Heads.
Hirayama is content with his life as a toilet cleaner in Tokyo. Outside of his structured routine, he cherishes music on cassette tapes, books, and taking photos of trees. Through unexpected encounters, he reflects on finding beauty in the world. (Avistaz)
Anselm Kiefer is one of the greatest contemporary artists. His past and present diffuse the line between film and painting thus giving unique cinematic experience dives deep into an artist's work and reveals his life path. (imdb)
U2: The Ground Beneath Her Feet (2000) - Short Film
Featuring scenes from the film The Million Dollar Hotel, and a cameo from Salman Rushdie who wrote the lyrics for the song, the video for The Ground Beneath Her feet was directed by Wim Wenders and filmed in early 2000 (youtube.com)
Idlewild: Live in a Hiding Place (2002) - Short Film
Official video for the third single from the album "The Remote Part" (2002) (youtube.com)
Willie Nelson: I Never Cared for You (1998) - Short Film
Official Music Video for I Never Cared For You performed by Willie Nelson
Willie Nelson: My Own Peculiar Way (1998) - Short Film
Music video by Willie Nelson performing My Own Peculiar Way
Die Toten Hosen: Warum werde ich nicht satt? (2000) - Short Film
Music video for Warum werde ich nicht satt? by Die Toten Hosen.
Die Toten Hosen: Auflösen (2009) - Short Film
Music video for Auflösen performed by Die Toten Hosen in duet with Birgit Minichmayr.
