Room 666 / Room 999 (Criterion Premieres) - BLU-RAY

CRITERION COLLECTION ROOM 666 / ROOM 999 At the 1982 Cannes Film Festival, Wim Wenders asked such filmmaking luminaries as Michelangelo Antonioni, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Jean-Luc Godard, Yilmaz Güney, Werner Herzog, Susan Seidelman, and Steven Spielberg to ponder the question “Is cinema a language about to get lost, an art about to die?” Forty years later—adopting the same minimalist, fixed-camera as Wenders—Lubna Playoust poses the same question to a group of contemporary auteurs, including David Cronenberg, Claire Denis, Asghar Farhadi, James Gray, Lynne Ramsay, and Wenders himself. Together, Wenders’ Room 666 and Playoust’s Room 999 capture the unfiltered perspectives of pathbreaking filmmakers on the state of the industry as well as the upheavals brought on by various new technologies and methods of distribution—in the process touching on large-scale issues of politics, culture, and the meaning (and continued relevance) of cinema in two distinct eras, nearly half a century apart. Room 666 1982 “Is cinema a language about to get lost, an art about to die?” At the 1982 Cannes Film Festival, Wim Wenders invited fifteen other filmmakers to give their personal answers to that question. Their responses—recorded privately via a static camera inside a hotel room—form an enlightening, provocative, and philosophical reflection on the challenges then facing filmmakers and on the possible future of their industry. Featuring luminaries such as Jean-Luc Godard, Werner Herzog, Steven Spielberg, Michelangelo Antonioni, Susan Seidelman, Yilmaz Güney, and, in his last interview before his death just weeks later, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Room 666 offers a uniquely candid look at the relationship between artists and their craft. Room 999 2023 Forty years after Wim Wenders asked leading filmmakers at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival to offer their thoughts on the future o