Wim Wenders: The Great Retrospective

#1: "Wings of Desire" w/ Yorgos Zois

In “Wings of Desire,” two angels descend upon divided Berlin in the 1980s, listening to the stories of its inhabitants. Damiel falls in love and decides he wants to live as a mortal.

Wim Wenders’ first film after his American period finds him returning to Germany with an improvisational ode to life itself.

Yorgos Zois, director of “Interruption” and “Arcadia,” which represents Greece at this year’s Oscars, sees in the film a dream, a story about all stories, and a portrait of a city that no longer exists.

#2: "Alice in the Cities" w/ Rinio Dragasaki

Philip is unable to complete the text he has undertaken to write about America. Instead, he takes Polaroid photos that never seem to match what he sees.

In a twist of fate, young Alice’s mother leaves her in his care, and together they embark on a journey across Germany, one that becomes a lesson for him.

Rinio Dragasaki sees in Wim Wenders’ “Alice in the Cities” a film whose themes feel strikingly contemporary, as well as a cinematic childishness that she herself has explored in films such as “Cosmic Candy” and “Dad, Lenin, and Freddy.”

#3: "Kings of the Road" w/ Syllas Tzoumerkas

Robert is depressed. Bruno is a drifter. Bruno picks up Robert, and together they set off on a journey without a destination.

On the often discordant relationship between the two men, Wim Wenders builds “Kings of the Road,” an abstract road movie set in the most ordinary and unremarkable landscapes of provincial Germany.

However, in this film, which concludes Wenders’ so-called ‘Road Movie trilogy,’ Syllas Tzoumerkas—creator of the films “Homeland,” “A Blast,” and “The Miracle of the Sargasso Sea”—discerns the greatest possible freedom a filmmaker can claim in cinema.

#4: "Room 666" w/ Elina Psykou

In 1982, at the Cannes Film Festival, a sense of unease hung in the air surrounding filmmakers. Television was on the rise, production studios were changing the rules of the game, and the future looked uncertain.

Wim Wenders set up a camera in Room 666 of the Hôtel Martinez. In front of it, fifteen film directors, including Jean-Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni, Werner Herzog, Steven Spielberg, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and others, answered a question: Is cinema a language in danger of extinction and an art form at risk of dying?

Cinema went on, and Elina Psykou made her own films: “Stray Bodies,” “Son of Sofia,” “The Eternal Return of Antonis Paraskevas.” Yet she still finds something deeply cinematic in this dystopian prophecy from four decades ago.

#5: "Paris, Texas" w/ Vasilis Kekatos

When “Paris, Texas” opens in the vast expanses of the American desert, Travis is a lost man. He has lost his voice, repressed his memories, and wanders through the boundless nowhere.

Travis’ journey toward redemption becomes the foundation for Wim Wenders’ most famous film, which finds all its key contributors at the height of their powers: the director himself, Sam Shepard on the script, Ry Cooder on the music, Robbie Müller on cinematography, and Harry Dean Stanton and Nastassja Kinski in the lead roles.

Vasilis Kekatos, the first Greek director to win the Palm d’Or in 2019 for his short film “The Distance Between Us and the Sky,” keeps returning to this film, finding in it a powerful story and an America he himself has been chasing.

#6: "Kings of the Road" w/ Alexis Alexiou

In “Kings of the Road,” Wim Wenders builds a simple, linear story around two incompatible characters, Bruno and Robert, who embark on a journey through provincial Germany.

Upon this simple premise, Wim Wenders develops a series of themes haunting the postwar generation in Germany: the traumatic legacy of Nazism, the country’s interrupted history, the crushing of memory, the intergenerational rupture, and the absence of images.

Alexis Alexiou, director of the film “Wednesday 04:45” and co-creator of ‘The Lost Avenue of Greek Cinema’ initiative, speaks about these multiple layers within what appears to be a simple road movie.

Bonus: "Tokyo-Ga" w/ Panagiotis Evangelidis

In 1983, during a busy creative period between “Hammett” and “Paris, Texas,” Wim Wenders visited Japan with a camera in hand to search for Tokyo as it had been captured by one of cinema’s great masters: Yasujirō Ozu.

“Tokyo-Ga” inaugurated Wenders’ long relationship with Japan, which continued through his 1989 portrait of fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto in “Notebook on Cities and Clothes.” Decades later, in 2023, Wenders returned to Tokyo for “Perfect Days,” a depiction of the stoic life of a man who cleans the city’s public toilets.

As a director, translator of Japanese literature, and someone with a deep knowledge of Japan, Panayotis Evangelidis helps us understand Wim Wenders’ Tokyo as it is portrayed across these three films.