Wim Wenders' marvelous dance documentary "Pina," which had a remarkable $88,399 opening this weekend in only three theaters, has been defying the odds for a couple of years now.
Its director (left), best known for the likes of "Paris, Texas," "Wings of Desire" and "The Buena Vista Social Club," struggled for decades to figure out how to document the work of German choreographer Pina Bausch and her Tanztheater Wuppertal.
He canceled the whole thing when Bausch died unexpectedly on the eve of a key shoot in the summer of 2009. And he restarted later that year with a film reconceived as a tribute rather than a collaboration.
"Pina" wound up in this year's Oscar race in the documentary category – where the film, which makes rich use of 3D, appeared to be crippled by the fact that doc branch voters screen submissions on 2D screener DVDs.
And yet it made the 15-film shortlist.
It also became a rare documentary entry in the Oscar Foreign-Language Film category, where voters often seem prejudiced against films that aren’t conventional narratives. And sure enough, I heard reports that its official screening for the general committee met with walkouts, and grumbling over the fact that it was "double-dipping" in the foreign and doc categories.
But no sooner had I written an annoyed item about that screening than I began to hear from other voters who were there, and at subsequent screenings – and the consensus from those viewers is that the film played extremely well and does have a real shot of advancing.
For my money, it certainly deserves it. I think "Pina" -- which begins its official L.A. run on Jan. 13 -- not only stands alongside "Hugo" as the year's best use of 3D, but it does a bold, brilliant job of capturing the work of a choreographer whose mesmerizing and challenging work has been enthralling me for a couple of decades.
The soft-spoken Wenders, it turns out, has been a Bausch fan almost as long.
You're in an unprecedented position, competing to be the first film ever nominated in both the Oscar documentary and foreign-language categories.
That was a big surprise. It's so hard to say what category of a film this is. I mean, choreography as such is fiction, so what we have in front of our cameras is mostly fiction. But we clearly made it with a documentary approach, and even more so after Pina's death.
For me, one of the wonderful things about the film is that it begins with an excerpt from the first Pina Bausch piece I ever saw, which knocked me out when I saw it at the Olympic Arts Festival in Los Angeles in 1984.
That was from the piece "Carnations." We used it as leitmotif throughout the film, because it seemed to show the passing of time so nicely.
