The German Film Academy will honor director Wim Wenders with its lifetime achievement award, the Academy announced Tuesday. Wenders will be honored at the 76th German Film Awards in Berlin on May 29.
Announcing the honor, Academy President Florian Gallenberger called the 80-year-old director of Paris, Texas, Wings of Desire, and Perfect Days, “an absolutely unique filmmaker [who] has been an icon of world cinema for over five decades.”
An iconic figure on the international arthouse scene, Wenders has won top honors at both the Cannes Film Festival (for Paris, Texas in 1984) and the Venice Film Festival (for The State of Things (1982), and is a three-time Oscar nominee for documentaries Buena Vista Social Club (2000), Pina (2012), and The Salt of the Earth (2015). His 2023 feature Perfect Days, shot in Japan, was also Oscar nominated, for best international feature. Wenders received a lifetime achievement award from the European Film Academy in 2024.
A jury, appointed by the board of the German Academy, picked Wenders for the honor. Alongside Gallenberger, this year’s jury included actor Pierre Sanoussi-Bliss, producer Ingo Fliess, casting director Nina Haun, directors Julia von Heinz and Andres Veiel, talent agent Mechthild Holter, and distributor Timm Oberwelland.
The decision can be seen as a sign of solidarity by the German film industry for the iconic director, who came under fire at this year’s Berlin Film Festival this year for public comments that, as filmmakers “we have to stay out of politics.” The comments, made at a Berlinale press conference in response to a question about Israel-Gaza, sparked online fury and led to allegations that Wenders was advocating for censorship. More than 100 artists, including Tilda Swinton, Javier Bardem and Adam McKay, signed an open letter criticizing Wenders and the Berlinale for allegedly “censoring artists who oppose Israel’s ongoing genocide [in Gaza].”
At the Berlinale awards ceremony, Wenders, as President of the international jury, gave a more detailed and nuanced explanation of his comments, arguing the work of political activists and film artists was distinct, but complementary. The language of cinema, Wenders said, “is highly differentiated” and “empathetic,” he argued, while “the language of social media is effective.”
He pointed to the highly political films his Berlinale jury honored, including German director Ilker Çatak’s Yellow Letters, about the Turkish government’s crackdown on artistic freedom, which won the Golden Bear, and Jury Prize winner Salvation, from Turkish director Emin Alper, the tale of a massacre in a small village which, in the director’s words, is an allegory for multiple global atrocities, including recent events in Palestine and Iran.
