FROM INSIDE OUT – The Architecture of Peter Zumthor | Wim Wenders

Four-time Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Wim Wenders explores the work and philosophy of Pritzker Prize-winning Swiss architect Peter Zumthor in an immersive documentary about the powerful relationship between people and the places they visit, work in, or inhabit, and about how architecture shapes the way we feel within them.

Filmed over more than 14 years and captured through cutting-edge 3D cinematography, the film invites audiences to experience Zumthor’s architectural originals through the eyes of visitors, users, inhabitants, or craftspeople. The camera moves through these spaces, turning architecture into an almost physical experience. Following his visit to Onassis Stegi in November 2025, Wim Wenders returns to present the film for its Athenian premiere. A documentary about architecture, but above all about how buildings shape our emotions, memories, and understanding of the world.

A production by Road Movies (Karsten Brünig, Wim Wenders) and DCM (Marc Schmidheiny, Christoph Daniel, Dario Suter, Joel Brandeis), with the support of Onassis Culture

“We all live in houses.”

We call them ‘homes’, because they protect us

and link us to our family and to our history.

Our memories are stored in them…

They help us establish our biography and form our identity.

We eat and sleep and dream in houses,

we grow up and raise our children in them.

We go to work in offices, enjoy art in museums and pray in churches.

We spend a lot of our time inside houses.

They largely define the conditions of our lives.

Yet, most of us don’t know much about buildings,

houses or homes, let alone about ‘architecture’.

Still, we mostly just take it for granted.

I wanted to change that with this film.

"FROM INSIDE OUT"

wants to sharpen our sense of place,

enlarge our sensorium for houses or ‘homes’,

so that we’re more aware how architecture influences us

and shapes ourselves and for our societies.

This film is not trying to teach you anything.

Instead, it offers you a sensual experience that will allow you

to simply take in a few basic things about architecture.

Your guide in this adventure of discovery is Peter Zumthor,

one of the great living architects of our time.

He is highly selective in his choice of projects;

and once committed, he takes his time,

so he can improve the future building in the construction process,

like writers, painters, composers or filmmakers, in my case.

Like us, he believes that anything you produce

can be perfected as you are making it.

– Wim Wenders