Spend a week with the films of Wim Wenders, one of the pioneers of the New German Cinema in the 1970s and one of the most important figures in contemporary German film. We will also be celebrating the 30th anniversary of Wings of Desire, Wenders’ “gorgeous visual time capsule” (A.O. Scott).

Aug 25-31, 2017
Row House Cinema

– Alice in the Cities
– Buena Vista Social Club
– Paris, Texas
– Wings of Desire

Showtimes/Tickets – http://bit.ly/rh_WendersWeek

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Alice in the Cities (1974)
Technically, Alice in the Cities is Wenders’s fourth film, but he often refers to it as his first, because it was during this film that he discovered the genre of the road movie. The German journalist Winter wants to write a story about America but is unable to accomplish anything but a series of Polaroids before disappointedly beginning his journey back home. At the same time, he reluctantly agrees to take little Alice (Yella Rottländer) with him, because her mother (Lisa Kreuzer)—whom he meets in New York on the day before his departure—has urgent business to take care of there.

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Buena Vista Social Club (1999)
With a small film crew, Wenders accompanied his old friend Ry Cooder on a trip to Havana. Cooder wanted to record his material for Ibrahim Ferrer’s solo album at a studio there—following the recording of the first Buena Vista Social Club CD (which had not yet been released at that time). Over the course of several months, he observed and accompanied the musicians—first at home in Havana; then, weeks later, in April 1998, on their trip to Amsterdam for the first public performance of the band (who had never played together outside a studio); then, still later, in July 1998, to their triumphal concert at New York’s Carnegie Hall.

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Paris, Texas (1984)
Paris, Texas is Wenders’s best-known and internationally most successful film. This unconventional road movie is based on a script by Pulitzer Prize winner Sam Shepard and tells the story of Travis (Harry Dean Stanton), a man who wanders out of Mexico and into the blazing heat of Texas’s Big Bend one day. Travis does not speak a word. He also seems to have largely lost his memory. But he is driven by his wish to find his family again.

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Wings of Desire (1987)
Wings of Desire marked Wenders’s homecoming and was his first German film after eight years in America. The main characters are guardian angels—benevolent, invisible beings in trench coats—who listen to the thoughts of mortals and attempt to comfort them. One of them, Damiel (Bruno Ganz), wishes to become human after he falls in love with the beautiful trapeze artist Marion (Solveig Dommartin).