Wenders bender: A very Wim evening

A line of people began to form outside Regal cinema, one of Mumbai's last surviving single-screen theaters.

- Dhamini Ratnam

MUMBAI: Early Thursday evening, a line of people began to form outside Regal cinema, one of Mumbai's last surviving single-screen theaters. A few hours later, as they filed in, conversations flew fast and loose. Some compared German auteur Wim Wenders's films from the 1970s to his most recent, Perfect Days (2023); some others carefully broke down the merits of German New Wave cinema, of which Wenders is considered an exemplar alongside Werner Herzog and Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

Wenders, who won the European Film Academy's Lifetime Achievement Award last year—even actor Juliet Binoche, who introduced him at the ceremony, couldn't hold back her tears when she described his filmography—is in Mumbai for a retrospective of his films.

And on Thursday evening, at Regal, packed to the rafters with scores of 20-somethings, the 79-year-old filmmaker held a masterclass.

"Movies can't change lives if you make them as 'product' or 'content.' Products and content don't change anybody's lives," he told the cheering audience.

Wenders is on his first trip to India.

Over the course of the month, Wenders will travel to five other cities, including Bengaluru, Kolkata, Thiruvananthapuram, and Delhi, before ending in Dungarpur in Rajasthan, to showcase a selection of his films.

All screenings will be free of cost, Shivendra Dungarpur, founder-director of Film Heritage Foundation, said. The foundation, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to preserving and restoring India's film heritage, has organized this retrospective of Wenders's films in collaboration with the German filmmaker's own eponymous foundation that has undertaken the work to restore all the director's films made in celluloid, as well as the Goethe-Institut Max Mueller Bhavan India.

Over the course of the next 25 days, he will meet audiences across the country and talk to them about the 18 films that he has chosen to show them.