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THE SECRET OF PLACES

DAS GEHEIMNIS DER ORTE

By Wim WENDERS

Documentary - Development 2024

We all come from houses; in which we live, dream, love, die. The Secret of Places aims to investigate the implication of architecture in our everyday lives and to take its viewers on a journey to Swiss architect Peter Zumthor’s most impressive places.

- Year of production
- 2024
- Genres
- Documentary, Art - Culture, 3D
- Countries
- GERMANY, SWITZERLAND, NORWAY
- Languages
- GERMAN, ENGLISH
- Budget
- 3 - 5 M$
- Duration
- 90 mn
- Director(s)
- Wim WENDERS
- Cast
- Peter ZUMTHOR
- Producer(s)
- Léa GERMAIN (ROAD MOVIES GMBH), Karsten BRÜNIG (ROAD MOVIES GMBH), Marc SCHMIDHEINY (DCM FILM DISTRIBUTION (BERLIN)), Christoph DANIEL (DCM FILM DISTRIBUTION (ZURICH)), Thomas ROBSAHM (OSLO PIX)
- Synopsis
- "We all come from houses..." is a quote from a book by the architect Peter Zumthor. It sheds light on the essence of our film, and is therefore the mantra of this project. Architecture is not only an art form with aesthetic and social implications, but also provides a decisive overall structure to the habits of our life, more directly connected to our existential needs than any other art form. Indeed, we come from countless houses in which we live, work, sleep, eat and drink, think, dream, love and die. How and where we live, or have lived, has shaped us deep down. The Secret of Places aims to instil a sense of this, priming its viewers and taking them on a journey. A journey into the places of Peter Zumthor.
  One of the main focuses of our film will be the question: can we ourselves not recapture more of this sense of place, with which 'we humans' are all intrinsically equipped? After all, this is one of our primary abilities, along with seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting and smelling: the ability to 'read' a place, to understand it and to settle into it so that we can live in it better.
  In our film, Wim Wenders will accompany Peter Zumthor during the construction phase of two extraordinary buildings: there will be the new Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in the next few years, which has already made big waves before being built, and the completion of the extension to the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, for many one of the most beautiful museums in the world. In trying to figure out and recreate what we call Peter Zumthor's 'sense of place', we will also embark, often together with the architect, on an immersive journey through his most famous buildings. We will explore these auratic constructions - from the Witch Hunt Memorial in Vardø, the Kolumba Museum in Cologne or the Bruder Klaus Chapel in the Eifel, to the thermal baths in Vals - to find out what drives him, how he goes about it and what his principles and standards are.
  The Secret of Places is the joint project between two artists who share the desire to create an exoteric work on the borders between film, architecture, art, city and nature.