Wim Wenders

Wim Wenders (b. 1945, Düsseldorf) gained international recognition as a major protagonist of the New German Cinema of the 1970s. Today, he is considered one of the most prominent figures in contemporary world cinema. The work of the screenwriter, director, producer, photographer, and author includes multiple award-winning feature and documentary films, photo exhibitions presented worldwide, as well as numerous photo books, film books, and collections of essays. He lives and works with his wife Donata Wenders in the countryside near Berlin.

After graduating from school, Wim Wenders began to study medicine and philosophy before moving to Paris in 1966 “to fulfill his dream and become a painter.” Alongside his apprenticeship in the studio of the graphic artist and engraver Johnny Friedlaender, he spent his afternoons and then increasingly his nights at the Cinémathèque Française, where he watched hundreds of films, most of them introduced by Henri Langlois. This “crash course in the history of cinema” became an important stage in his education in which Wenders began to see film as an “extension of painting by other means.”

Wenders began his career as a filmmaker in autumn 1967 when he enrolled at the newly founded University of Television and Film (HFF) in Munich. Parallel to his studies at the HFF, he also worked as a film critic from 1967 until the early 1970s. It was during this time that he made his first short films, some of them outside of film school. Immediately after graduating with the feature film “Summer in the City” (1970), he and fifteen other directors and writers founded the Filmverlag der Autoren in 1971, a cooperative of young German auteur filmmakers who thus took production, rights management, and distribution of their films into their own hands.