Wim Wenders

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Uploaded by on May 17, 2010

Wim Wenders was born on the 14th of August, 1945, in Düsseldorf, Germany.

After he graduated from the Gymnasium (high school) in Oberhausen, an industrial city in the Ruhr district, Wim began his studies in medicine (1963-64) and philosophy (1964-65) in Freiburg and Düsseldorf. However, he interrupted his academic education and decided to become a painter. He moved to Paris in October of 1966, where he failed his entry test at the Art Academy. Instead he worked as an engraver in the atelier of the American artist Johnny Friedlander in Montparnasse. During that time he also became a regular visitor of the Cinemathèque Francaise, saw up to 5 movies a day and more than a thousand films altogether and got hooked on cinema.

Wim returned to Germany in 1967, worked briefly in the Düsseldorf office of United Artists and that autumn entered the "Hochschule für Fernsehen and Film" (Graduate School of Film and Television), which had just been founded in Munich.

In 1976, he started "Road Movies Filmproduktion Inc" in Berlin, which produced over the years not only Wenders films, but was involved in more than a hundred productions and coproductions up to 2003. For a number years in the early 80s, Wim also had a production company in New York together with Chris Sievernich, Gray City Inc.

While producing and directing through these various companies, Wim Wenders would become one of the major figures to emerge from the New German Cinema.


In 1984 he also became a member of the "Akademie der Künste" in Berlin.

In 1987, besides the release of his film "Der Himmel über Berlin", (Wings of desire in English) winner of the prize for Best Director at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival, he also published his first photo book, "Written in the West", which reflected his fascination with the American West. This collection of photographs would be followed by many other books, collections of essays and reflections on filmmaking. He also published a number of books that accompanied his films. (Kings of the Road was the first of those, followed by Paris, Texas, Tokyo-Ga, Wings of Desire and others)

receiving an honorary doctor title at the Sorbonne University in Paris, FranceIn 1989 Wim Wenders received an honorary doctor title from the Sorbonne University in Paris.

In 1991 he completed his long-time science-fiction project, "Until the End of the World". Unhappy with the abbreviated version he was forced to release, he continued editing after the release of the film and produced a 5-hour directors cut that was going to be released only 12 years later. In the same year he received the prestigious Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Award in Bielefeld.

From 1991 to 1996 he was the appointed Chairman of the European Film Academy and was subsequently elected as the Academys President, a function he still fills out today. Between 1993 and 1999 he has been teaching at the HFF in Munich, the film school he attended himself. Since 2003, he is teaching as a professor at the Hamburg Academy of Arts, the HfbK.

In 1995 he received another honorary doctorat (in divinity) this time from the theological faculty of the University of Fribourg in Switzerland.

Since then he has filmed his movies mainly in the US and in English. Most notably "The End of Violence", the award winning music documentary "Buena Vista Social Club" and "The Million Dollar Hotel" which won a Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 2000.

Between 2001 and 2003 he also worked on Soul of a Man, his contribution to the 7-part BLUES series that was executive-produced and initiated by Martin Scorsese. And in 2002 he wrote and directed 'Twelve Miles to Trona', a segment for the Nicholas McClintok project 'Ten Minutes Older'.

Wims photo exhibition after Written in the West, entitled Pictures From the Surface of the Earth, went from the Hamburger Bahnhof museum in Berlin to the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao and is touring since then through museums in Asia, Australia and Europe.

In 2004 Wim released Land of Plenty in Europe, a film dealing with poverty and paranoia in America. That movie concluded his LA trilogy, together with End of Violence and The Million Dollar Hotel.

In 2006 Wim spent time in the Congo; contributing to a project for 'Medicos Sin Fronteras' the Spanish chapter of 'Doctors without Borders'. The resulting segment 'Invisibles', premiered at the 2007 Berlinale. After writing, producing and directing the short 'War in Peace', his contribution to a collective of 33 shorts directed by different directors about their feeling about Cinema, Wim returned to his hometown Duesseldorf and later to Palermo, to film his latest feature film project 'The Palermo Shooting'. This film marks his return as a director to European soil after he had exclusively worked in the Americas since the mid-nineties.

Wim Wenders currently lives in Los Angeles and Berlin, together with his wife, photographer Donata Wenders.

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  • Der Deutsche Ur-Hipster-Spiesser!

  • =D .

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