Pina

Wim Wenders's Pina (2011) earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary and was one of the first art-house films to make expressive use of 3-D. It was conceived as a collaboration with the choreographer Pina Bausch, and it became an elegy when she died unexpectedly, days before shooting was due to begin.

Wenders skips the conventional biography. He builds the film from performances of Bausch's signature works, Café Müller, The Rite of Spring and Kontakthof, staged in the theatre and in striking real locations around Wuppertal, the city where her company was based. Between the dances her performers offer brief, often wordless testimonies to what she meant to them. The stereoscopic depth gives the choreography a sculptural weight, and it draws the viewer into the space of the movement in a way that flat cinema rarely manages.

Critics took it as a breakthrough in how dance could be put on film, and as a moving memorial to a singular artist. Grief runs all the way through it, and so does a real formal curiosity about what 3-D can do with bodies in space. Pina carried Bausch's revolutionary Tanztheater to audiences far beyond the dance world, and it remains a landmark of the 3-D era as well as a heartfelt act of homage from one major German artist to another.