"Room 666", dir. Wim Wenders, Germany 1982, 44 min

“There was a general gloom at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival. The feeling that the end of cinema was inevitable was roaming everywhere. A ”black hole” was opening in film history so to say. So I thought I would do a survey among my colleagues about the future of cinema. I invited them all to the only available room in the whole town. Room 666 at the Hotel Martinez. The was a single camera in the room and the question was on the table. My colleagues only had to turn on the tape recorder and the camera when they were ready to give their solitary answers. Godard, Fassbinder, Spielberg, Antonioni, Herzog, and other filmmakers gave a response to the question: “Is cinema a language about to get lost, an art about to die?” Some have answered the question very extensively, others were unsettled by the situation and remained silent, We then cut those out…”

"Room 999", dir. Lubna Playoust, Francja, Niemcy 2023, 85 min

In 1982, Wim Wenders asked 16 of his fellow directors to speak on the future of cinema, resulting in the film ”Room 666”. Now, 40 years later, in Cannes, director Lubna Playoust asks a new generation of filmmakers the same question: is cinema a language about to get lost, an art about to die? 30 prominent directors who attended the Cannes Festival in 2022 were left alone in a hotel room and express their views on the current situation of the art of cinema and filmmaking, as it is being threatened by new means of expression and consumption. The result is a captivating, smart, contradictory, fun, and thought-provoking conversation about the recent technological and sociological changes impacting cinema today.

Featuring: Wim Wenders, Audrey Diwan, Joachim Trier, David Cronenberg, Shannon Murphy, James Gray, Arnaud Desplechin, Lynne Ramsay, Asghar Farhadi, Nadav Lapid, Claire Denis, Davy Chou, Baz Luhrmann, Alice Winocour, Ayo Akingbade, Olivier Assayas, Paolo Sorrentino, Agnès Jaoui, Kirill Serebrennikov, Cristian Mungiu, Kleber Mendoça Filho, Albert Serra, Monia Chokri, Ninja Thyberg, Pietro Marcello, Rebecca Zlotowski, Ali Cherri, Ruben Östlund, Clément Cogitore and Alice Rohrwacher.