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Room 666 / Room 999 (Janus Contemporaries) on DVD

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, Yılmaz 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 format 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, Yılmaz 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 of cinema in his documentary Room 666, Lubna Playoust poses the same question—“Is cinema a language about to get lost, an art about to die?”—to a new generation of directors. Utilizing the same minimalist, fixed camera format as Wenders, Playoust invites thirty directors who attended the 2022 festival—including Claire Denis, David Cronenberg, Lynne Ramsay, Asghar Farhadi, James Gray, and Wenders himself—to give their unfiltered perspectives on the state of the industry. Touching on upheavals in the technology, distribution, and economics of filmmaking as well as on larger questions of politics and culture, their answers provide a thought-provoking exploration of the meaning and relevance of cinema in the twenty-first century.