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). The first three were Oscar-nominated. All were critically acclaimed.
But none has taken him as long as From Inside Out: The Architecture of Peter Zumthor, the German auteur’s 3D documentary on the Pritzker Prize-winning Swiss architect, has been 14 years in the making.
It started small. David Chipperfield, curating the 2012 Venice architecture Biennale, asked Wenders to make a short film on Zumthor. That became a two-day shoot in the architect’s modest office in Haldenstein, high in the Swiss mountains, and the 2012 short Notes on a Day in the Life of an Architect — along with the nagging sense that he had barely scratched the surface. “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.]
