''Anselm'' (german: Anselm – Das Rauschen der Zeit) is a 2023 German 3D

documentary film A documentary film or documentary is a non-fictional film, motion-picture intended to "document reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction, education or maintaining a Recorded history, historical record". Bill Nichols (film critic), Bil ...

directed by

Wim Wenders Ernst Wilhelm "Wim" Wenders (; born 14 August 1945) is a German filmmaker, playwright, author, and photographer. He is a major figure in New German Cinema. Among many honors, he has received three nominations for the Academy Award for Best Docum ...

, chronicling the art of German painter and sculptor

Anselm Kiefer Anselm Kiefer (born 8 March 1945) is a German painter and sculptor. He studied with Peter Dreher and Horst Antes at the end of the 1960s. His works incorporate materials such as straw, ash, clay, lead, and shellac. The poems of Paul Celan hav ...

. The film had its world premiere at the

76th Cannes Film Festival The 76th annual Cannes Film Festival was a film festival that took place from 16 to 27 May 2023. Swedish filmmaker Ruben Östlund served as jury president. With the French film '' Anatomy of a Fall'' winning the Palme d'Or, the festival's top p ...

on 17 May 2023 as a special screening, where it competed for the

L'Œil d'or ''L'Œil d'or, le prix du documentaire'' — Cannes (, "The Golden Eye, The Documentary Prize — Cannes") is a documentary film award created in 2015. It is awarded to the best documentary presented in one of the sections of the Cannes Film Festi ...

Synopsis

Described as "immersive", the film focuses on painter and sculptor

. The project illuminates his work, life journey, inspiration, creative process, and the artist's fascination with myth and history. The aim is to "blur" the boundary between film and painting.

Cast

as Anselm * Daniel Kiefer as Anselm (young man) * Anton Wenders as Anselm (child)

Production

Karsten Brünig produced the documentary for Road Movies Filmproduktion. Wenders shot the film at

6K resolution Digital cinema refers to adoption of digital technology within the film industry to distribute or project motion pictures as opposed to the historical use of reels of motion picture film, such as 35 mm film. Whereas film reels have to be sh ...

and in the 3D format, which he previously utilized for his 2011 documentary ''

Pina Pina may refer to: People * Pina (name), a list of people with the given name, nickname, surname or stage name Places * Pina, Nepal, a village development committee * Pina, Mallorca, Spain, a town * Pina de Ebro, a municipality of the province o ...

''. It was shot over the course of two years, in Germany, France and Italy. Wenders called the film "a labor of love and turned out to take seven shooting periods and altogether three years to become a film like nothing I've ever done before. I think we stretched the possibilities of 3D into an unknown territory."

Release

''Anselm'' was selected to be screened in the Special Screenings section at the

, where it had its world premiere on 17 May 2023. On the same occasion, Wenders also received an invitation to the festival's main competition for his feature film '' Perfect Days''. World sales were acquired by

HanWay Films HanWay Films is an independent British international sales, distribution and marketing company specializing in theatrical feature films. History In 1999, Jeremy Thomas founded international sales company HanWay Films with his colleagues Peter Wats ...

. DCM Film Distribution secured the distribution rights for Germany, Austria and Switzerland. It was also invited at the

28th Busan International Film Festival 8 (eight) is the natural number following 7 and preceding 9. In mathematics 8 is: * a composite number, its proper divisors being , , and . It is twice 4 or four times 2. * a power of two, being 2 (two cubed), and is the first number of t ...

in 'Icon' section and was screened in 6 October 2023. ''Anselm'' was theatrically released in Germany by DCM on 12 October 2023, and in France by

Les Films du losange Les films du losange is a film production company founded by Barbet Schroeder and Éric Rohmer in 1962. The company funds and distributes many films from the French nouvelle vague era, directed by Rohmer, Schroeder, Roger Planchon, Jacques Rivett ...

on 18 October 2023. U.S. distribution rights were acquired by Sideshow and

Janus Films Janus Films is an American film distribution company. The distributor is credited with introducing numerous films, now considered masterpieces of world cinema, to American audiences, including the films of Michelangelo Antonioni, Sergei Eisenstein ...

Reception

Critical response

Rotten Tomatoes Rotten Tomatoes is an American review-aggregation website for film and television. The company was launched in August 1998 by three undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley: Senh Duong, Patrick Y. Lee, and Stephen Wang ...

, the film holds an approval rating of 98% based on 47 reviews, with an average rating of 7.6/10. The website's critics consensus reads, "Visually thrilling and refreshingly unconventional, ''Anselm'' pays mesmerizing tribute to a brilliant artist's life and legacy." On

Metacritic Metacritic is a website that review aggregator, aggregates reviews of films, TV shows, music albums, video games and formerly, books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted arithmetic mean, weighted average). M ...

, the film has a

weighted average The weighted arithmetic mean is similar to an ordinary arithmetic mean (the most common type of average), except that instead of each of the data points contributing equally to the final average, some data points contribute more than others. The ...

score of 82 out of 100, based on 24 critic reviews, indicating "universal acclaim".

Awards and nominations

References

External links

* {{Wim Wenders 2023 films 2023 3D films 2023 documentary films 2020s German films 2020s German-language films 3D documentary films Documentary films about painters Films directed by Wim Wenders German 3D films German documentary films HanWay Films films Films about sculptors