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Wim Wenders Completes 14-Year Journey with Peter Zumthor Documentary 'From Inside Out
Confirmed
In Short: Cinematographer Wim Wenders has spent 14 years creating a two-hour documentary on Pritzker Prize-winning architect Peter Zumthor, premiering at the Venice Film Festival.
Wenders has been working on the project for a long time, starting with a short film for the 2012 Venice architecture Biennale.
The documentary, titled 'From Inside Out,' explores Zumthor's architectural journey, from his earliest works to his latest projects, including the David Geffen Galleries at LACMA.
Wenders, known for his portraits of other artists, says he was intrigued by Zumthor's work and the idea of capturing the essence of his buildings.
The film, which will be sold worldwide by HanWay Films, aims to show the craftsmanship and serenity of Zumthor's designs, challenging the notion that such spaces are a luxury in a world of flattened cities.
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- Peter Zumthor is asking for exactly that freedom that I also fight for with every film: invent and improve the film – or the building – as you are making it.
- Cinema has been incredibly inventive in this make-believe and has invented many tools to convince the audience that the story they were watching was taking place inside space, even if the movies were always a medium restricted to the flat screen.
- Wim Wenders has spent much of the past three decades building portraits of other artists — the Cuban musicians of Buena Vista Social Club (1999), the choreographer Pina Bausch in Pina (2011), the photographer Sebastião Salgado in The Salt of the Earth (2014), the German painter-sculptor Anselm Kiefer in Anslem (2023).
- “At the end, we shook hands on ‘doing something real together,'” Wenders says.
- “Little did we know that the journey would last 14 years…” The result, premiering in Venice, and being sold worldwide by HanWay Films, is a two-hour immersion that wanders from some of Zumthor’s earliest works, including the St.
- Benedict’s chapel, completed in 1988, to a memorial for burned witches above the Arctic Circle, to the newly opened $724 million David Geffen Galleries at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the architect’s largest building, commissioned nearly two decades ago.
- [Brad Pitt, a fan of Zumthor, who supported his LACMA bid, has joined From Inside Out as an executive producer.
- ] Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter ahead of the premiere, Wenders discussed his kinship with Zumthor, why he needed 3D to shoot architecture, what a craftsman’s hands can teach the age of AI, and how he answers the charge that Zumthor’s serene spaces are a luxury in a world of flattened cities.