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CANNES 2008 Competition / Germany

Wenders comes home

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"Fear of death is the main theme in Palermo Shooting [+see also:
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. No one faces it. Rather, they speak of the absence of death," said Wim Wenders at the film’s press conference this morning. His film, which screened in competition at Cannes is a road movie that brought him back to Europe after 12 years spent making films in America. And to his native city, Düsseldorf, and, naturally, Palermo, where Finn, a successful photographer (played by Campino, singer of the rock band Toten Hosen) tired of life, eventually finds love (with Italian actress Giovanna Mezzogiorno).

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"Palermo is a city full of life, but one of its most important holidays is for the dead,” said the Palme d’Or winning director of Paris, Texas (1984). "I took a classic trip from Germany to Sicily after re-reading Goethe". In "the most wonderful place on Earth,” as the author of The Sorrows of Young Werther called it in 1787, the main character finds himself face to face with death, played by Dennis Hopper, who again worked with Wenders, 30 years after The American Friend.

Not at all warmly received after its press screening, Palermo Shooting was shot on film and digitalized at Berlin’s Das Werk, with numerous effects added later. The film makes many references to the relativity of the reality and truth of the digital process. "I’ve lost faith in the class structure of cinema," said Wenders of his chosen form.

There is also much of the director’s beloved rock music: from a cameo by Lou Reed to two songs written for the film by Nick Cave, as well as Fabrizio De Andrè and Rosa Balestrieri.

Co-produced by Wenders’s company Neue Road Movies, the film is being sold by the London-based HanWay Films.

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(Translated from Italian)

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