Wim Wenders · 1974 · road

Wim Wenders's 1974 road movie, the first of his loose Road Trilogy, in which a blocked German writer and an abandoned child crisscross the post-war landscapes of America and the German Ruhr in search of the girl's grandmother, armed only with an old photograph. Quiet, melancholy and luminous, it is one of the defining films of the New German Cinema. The journey runs from America to Amsterdam and into the Ruhr.

1. 1
   New York

   Philip Winter, a German journalist adrift in America and unable to write, photographs the country obsessively and decides to go home.

2. 2
   Amsterdam

   At the airport he is left in charge of a nine-year-old girl, Alice, whose mother vanishes; they fly together to Amsterdam to begin looking for her grandmother.

3. 3
   The Ruhr

   With only an old photograph of a house to go on, the man and the child wander the industrial towns of the Ruhr, two lost souls slowly becoming a kind of family.