Room 999

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.