Wim Wenders meets Adoor Gopalakrishnan during his first-ever India tour

During his visit, Wenders met legendary Indian filmmaker Adoor Gopalakrishnan, known for his contributions to Malayalam cinema. The two directors discussed their respective journeys in filmmaking, exchanging insights on cinema’s evolving role in in a changing world. Wenders, known for films like Paris, Texas (1984) and Wings of Desire (1987), has explored themes of travel, alienation, and existential contemplation. Gopalakrishnan, with films such as Elippathayam (1981) and Mathilukal (1990), is known for his deeply introspective movies set against Kerala’s cultural and political landscape.

Two legends, two styles

Wenders, a key figure in New German Cinema, has long been associated with a distinct visual style and narrative depth. Gopalakrishnan, trained at FTII Pune, has developed a cinematic language rooted in realism and social commentary. Their works, while stylistically different, share a commitment to storytelling that transcends commercial constraints. Wenders’ cinema collapses the boundaries between exile and home, articulating an existential homelessness that feels both political and personal. Gopalakrishnan, on the other hand, operates in a rooted yet equally restless terrain — his cinema scrutinises the unspoken hierarchies and traditions that shape life in Kerala, unpeeling the emotional and psychological layers of his characters with the precision of a master storyteller.

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Wenders’ films are visual diaries of dislocation, saturated with the loneliness of wide-open highways and ghostly urban corridors. His frames are composed with an awareness of how space conditions human experience — be it the neon-lit wastelands of neo-noir, The American Friend (1977), or the silent reckonings in Alice in the Cities (the first part of the Road Movie trilogy, 1974) His characters exist in transit, longing for reconciliation but unable to bridge the gulf between past and present. Gopalakrishnan, conversely, does not depict physical exile but instead draws on entrapment — his protagonists are prisoners of custom, ritual, and social expectations. In Elippathayam (The Rat Trap, 1982), a man’s descent into solipsism mirrors the slow decay of feudalism, while Nizhalkkuthu (2002) turns a colonial-era hangman’s moral crisis into a meditation on duty and guilt.

The politics of seeing

The politics of seeing is central to both filmmakers. Wenders’ cinema wrestles with the image itself — his characters use cameras, mirrors, and windows as tools of inquiry, as if trying to verify the truth of their own existence. Kings of the Road (third part of the Road Movie trilogy, 1976) literalizes this, following two drifters repairing cinema projectors in a West Germany losing its collective memory. Gopalakrishnan’s approach is more ascetic but no less rigorous; his frames often resist exposition, inviting the viewer to engage with the slow rhythms of everyday life. In Mathilukal (1990), adapted from Vaikom Muhammad Basheer’s novel, the unseen presence of a woman across a prison wall makes for a love story that thrives entirely in the realm of the imagined.

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Both directors are concerned with the fragile nature of connection — between people, places, and histories. Where Wenders’ cinema articulates longing through movement and the fragmentation of modern life, Gopalakrishnan finds his poetry in stasis, in the quiet negotiations of power that unfold in confined spaces. Their works, though distinct in tone and setting, challenge the notion of belonging itself, reminding us that home is not a fixed geography but an constantly changing state of being.