A Trick of Light

Working with a group of Munich-based film students and acclaimed director Wim Wenders celebrates a century of cinema by reappraising the importance of the Skladanowsky Brothers, one of the pioneers of early cinema. Part docudrama, part experimental re-enactment, this is Wenders at his most playful and imaginative. Fictional recreations of the brothers’ development of the ‘bioskop’, a primitive version of the film projector, are framed by an interview with Max Skladanowsky’s surviving daughter, Lucie, whose reminiscences bring a forgotten world back to life. Ultimately, A Trick of Light is a meditation on the nature of film and its ability to capture the world around us, made by a director acutely aware of the medium’s limitations within a rapidly changing world. (British Film Institute (BFI))