Best Documentary: Wim Wenders’ Pina

ABOVE: WIM WENDERS. PHOTO COURTESY OF IFC FILMS.

3-D documentary Pina is  writer and director Wim Wender’s second Academy Award nomination; he was first nominated in 2000 for Buena Vista Social Club. Pina was also (apparently) Germany’s official submission for the Best Foreign Film Oscar Award, a nomination it did not receive. Wenders and his producer, Gian-Piero Ringel, are, however, among the contenders for Best Documentary. When we caught Wenders at the 2011 Toronto film festival, he explained the necessity of 3-D technology in Pina, forever convincing us that 3-D is more than just an excuse to re-release Titanic:

“I could not have done justice to Pina’s art with the craft I had at my disposal for 20 years. I felt like there was an invisible wall between what the dancers were doing on stage and the physical, contagious quality of it. I felt like I could only deliver a faint blueprint of what they were doing. I thought there must be a better way to dance. Not the outside looking in, but inside the world of dancers. It only dawned on me when I saw my first 3-D film that there was finally a language that could handle that. And there was an affinity between dance and 3-D. With every gesture, every movement, dancers discover space and create space. It seemed so obvious that you had to enter their realm in order to talk about it. For the first time, there was a tool available to access that space.”

Click here to read the full interview.