Anselm

Released in 2023, Anselm is the third feature-length 3D documentary by Wim Wenders, after Pina (2011) and The Salt of the Earth (2014). Wenders has known the painter Anselm Kiefer for several decades, and the project began as a series of studio visits before becoming a full production shot over two years across Germany and France. It premiered at the 76th Cannes Film Festival as a Special Screening, where it was nominated for the Œil d'or for documentaries.

The film places Kiefer himself, alongside the artist's son Daniel and Wenders's nephew Anton (playing Anselm as a younger man and a child), inside the immense halls of his studios. Cinematographer Franz Lustig shoots in stereoscopic 3D, allowing the camera to move slowly through Kiefer's lead suits, charred sunflowers, ash-coated canvases and concrete towers. Leonard Küßner's sparse score, mixing concrète textures with passages drawn from Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann (whose words run through Kiefer's work), won the IDA Award for Best Original Music.

Reception focused on the film as a serious meeting of two German post-war sensibilities: a director who has spent his career reckoning with national memory, and a painter whose work has insisted on naming the German past directly. Critics in Sight & Sound, Cahiers du Cinéma and Le Monde praised it as one of Wenders's strongest late-career projects, and it has since travelled to museum and gallery programmes alongside Kiefer's exhibitions.