A retrospective of documentary shorts from acclaimed filmmaker Wim Wenders (Perfect Days, Paris, Texas).

ROOM 666 (1982, 50m) Shot during the Cannes Film Festival, this documentary places a fixed camera in a hotel room and invites major filmmakers—including Jean-Luc Godard, Werner Herzog, and Steven Spielberg—to respond to a central question: Is cinema a dying art? The result is an intimate, philosophical time capsule capturing anxieties about the future of film in the early 1980s.

REVERSE ANGLE (1982, 42 min) A personal “diary film” made in New York, reflecting on Wenders’ experiences working on Hammett with Francis Ford Coppola. Blending travel impressions, music, literature, and visual art (including references to Edward Hopper), the film explores creative displacement and contrasts between European and American filmmaking cultures.

A TRICK OF THE LIGHT (1995, 1hr19m) A hybrid docu-fiction created for the centenary of cinema, recounting the story of the Skladanowsky brothers—early German innovators who developed one of the first projection systems. Mixing reenactments, archival-style imagery, and interviews, the film playfully examines the birth of cinema while reflecting on invention, illusion, and the fragile origins of the medium.