The Hollywood Reporter can exclusively unveil the trailer for Wim Wenders‘ From Inside Out — The Architecture of Peter Zumthor, the German director’s 3D documentary on the Pritzker Prize-winning Swiss architect, 14 years in the making.
Filmed across more than a dozen locations over fourteen years and shot in cutting-edge 3D, From Inside Out moves from Zumthor’s early works, including the 1988 St. Benedict’s chapel, to the newly completed David Geffen Galleries at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) — the architect’s largest building, commissioned nearly two decades ago. Rather than presenting Zumthor’s work through drawings or conventional architectural documentation, Wenders trains his camera on the people who encounter, inhabit and build these spaces, letting the buildings unfold from the inside.
The trailer centers on one of the film’s most striking passages: novelist Siri Hustvedt‘s first encounter with the Steilneset Memorial, the structure Zumthor built above the Arctic Circle in northern Norway to commemorate the 91 people burned at the stake there as suspected witches in the 17th century. The footage follows Hustvedt as she walks the length of the memorial’s long wooden corridor for the first time, alone with a history she has written about for years but never physically visited.
“Hustvedt had written about the women who were burned as witches in that part of Norway, far above the Arctic Circle. But she had never seen the place Zumthor built in memory of these women,” Wenders tells The Hollywood Reporter. “Her experience of encountering that building becomes the film in that chapter,” Wenders says. “Who can travel so far north — further north than any city in the U.S. or Canada — to visit this one-of-a-kind place and this absolutely unique building that is like nothing that was ever built before? Well, not many. But you can almost physically enter the building in the film.”
From Inside Out will have its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival on Sept. 6, and is being sold worldwide by HanWay Films.
Check out the exclusive trailer below.
English (US) ·