Retrospective Wim Wenders

09/05 (Thursday), 19:00

WINGS OF DESIRE  (Der Himmel über Berlin, 1987)
dir. Wim Wenders (DE/FR), 128’
Special Screenings: Film meets Philosophy
Official Opening of the 9. Philosophical Film Festival

Topic: "Wim Wenders: Travelling as a Quest for Our Own Identity"
– Marjan Vujovich (Head of the Museum of Yugoslav Cinematheque in Belgrade) (in Serbian)


What is it that people know, but angels don’t know? Wenders’s timeless film about seeing doesn’t have people as the protagonists, but angels, whose peaceful gaze along with the one of the camera shows a different perspective (or possibility) for seeing the world. The angels in WINGS OF DESIRE are good, invisible creatures overlooking the world, listening to the thoughts of mortals while trying to offer them consolation. One of them, Damiel (Bruno Ganz), wishes to become human and “to enter the history of the world” when he falls in love with the beautiful trapeze artist Marion (Solveig Dommartin). Peter Falk, playing himself, helps him during his transformation, introducing him to the small pleasures of life and to “what it is to be a human”.
WINGS OF DESIRE marked the coming of Wenders back to Germany, being his first German film after spending eight years in the United States. Shot two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the film is an homage to the “divided” city from a unique perspective, that of the angels. The film whose co-writer is Peter Handke (Als das Kind Kind war…), won the Best Director Award in Cannes (1987) and the European Film Awards (1988) and since then it has earned its cult status.

27.05 (Monday), 20.00 h.
Cinematheque of N. Macedonia

Documentary Germany / USA, 92 min., color
Director & Screenplay: Wim Wenders

Introduction about Wenders and Ozu by Prof. Dr. Stefan Sidov

Inspired by the film legacy of the Japanese director Yasujirô Ozu, Wim Wenders travels to Japan seeking for Tokyo from the films of Ozu. In this documentary film, the award-winning director and producer combines inserts from one of his favorite directors through the images of Tokyo 30 year later – now a noisy metropolis full of trafic and bustle – in the attempt to discover where the real world and the world of film (maybe) intersect.
Wenders interviews Ozu’s regular cinematographer - Yûharu Atsuta and one of his favorite actors who plays in most of Ozu’s films - Chishû Ryû. And while trying to rediscover Tokyo through the eyes and through the camera of Ozu, Wenders discovers a new Tokyo through the pachinko, the golfers on city roofs, the neon lights in Ginza, baseball games in a cemetery and the wax-overed food in the restaurant windows of this Tokyo from the ‘80s. Two “Tokyo Stories”, by two directors who get to know each other by pointing their look/camera towards the same city. TOKYO-GA was shown in the “Un certain Regard“ programme on the Cannes Film Festival in 1985.

28.05 (Thursday), 20:00 h.
Cinematheque of N. Macedonia

Feature film, France, 109 min., color, B&W
Director: Wim Wenders

For the last 40 years, the Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado has been traveling through more than 120 countries all over the world, in the footsteps of an ever-changing humanity, documenting the dark side of the human condition in the hidden corners of the world. He has witnessed some of the major events of our recent history; international conflicts, starvation and exodus. After many years spent transmiting these images to the other end of the world, he is now embarking on the discovery of pristine territories, of wild fauna and flora, and of grandiose landscapes as part of a huge photographic project, which is a tribute to the planet's beauty – the project “Genesis”.
Sebastião Salgado's life and work are revealed to us by his son, Juliano, who went with him during his last travels, and by Wim Wenders, himself a photographer. THE SALT OF THE EARTH has won the Special Prize in the „Un certain Regard“ programme on Cannes IFF in 2014 and was nominated for the Academy Award for Documentary Feature. Timeless film for anyone who loves photography and who believes that “the act of seeing” is not a given, but the enduring images – in order to be found, first need to be sought for.

29.05 (Wednesday), 20.00 h.
Cinematheque of N. Macedonia

Documentary, Germany / USA, 45 min., color
Director & Screenplay: Wim Wenders

During the 35th Cannes International Film Festival in 1982, Wim Wenders invites a group of 15 international directors to answer few questions about the future of cinema, each one at a time, in the same hotel room (Room no. 666, hotel Martinez). The main question that his colleagues needed to answer was: “Is cinema a language about to get lost, an art about to die?” Each director is given one 16 mm real, or 11 minutes to answer the questions, so that any differences in the answers can be correctly interpreted as reflecting differences between persons rather than differences in the process that produced the answer.
ROOM 666 included European auteurs as well as Hollywood directors, direvtors with narrative and experimental approaches, men and women filmmakers who work in the film industry and that are presenting their films or they are simply present at the 35th Cannes Film Festival. The directors came from France, Italy, Brazil, Lebanon, Germany, Turkey, Philippines and the USA, and among them were Antonioni, Herzog, Fassbinder, Godard…The film which was presented at the Cannes IFF in 2006 presents us with an interesting reflection on the future of cinema by some of the greatest filmmakers of our time.

30.05 (Thursday), 20.00 h.
Cinematheque of N. Macedonia

Documentary, Germany, 106 min., color
Director & Screenplay: Wim Wenders

Pina Bausch is an icon of contemporary dance. Famous as Isadora Duncan or Martha Graham, she revolutionized the language of dance. Created to instigate emotions in the spectator, the unique multimedia creations of Pina offer incomparable visual experiences. The idea of Wenders, conceived together with Bausch, was to make a film about dance as we have never seen before, a film that could borrow the best from the new 3D technology (which Wenders eagerly anticipated) so it could give dance its “third dimension” on the big screen. The film was interrupted by Pina’s sudden death in 2009. After some hesitation, Wenders decided to continue with the project together with Pina’s assemble Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, and to make a film which was, not only a film-homage about one of the biggest choreographers of our time, but also a film which, through the language of cinema and through a certain film perspective, could “revive” the world of dance. At the time when on 3D technology was seen mainly from a commercial standpoint, Wenders poses a different question: In which way could technology serve seeing and, if there is a difference between “looking” and “seeing”, which future of seeing will we decide on?