The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez Les beaux jours d'Aranjuez
A beautiful summer day. A garden. A terrace. A woman and a man under the trees, with a soft summer wind. In the distance, in the vast plain, the silhouette of Paris.
A conversation begins: questions and answers between the woman and the man. It deals with sexual experiences, childhood, memories, the essence of summer and the difference between men and women, it deals with feminine perspective and masculine perception.
In the background, inside the house that opens onto the terrace, on the woman and the man: the writer, in the process of imagining this dialogue and typing it down. Or is it the other way around? Might it be that those two characters, over there, tell him what he’s putting down on paper: a long, final dialogue between a man and a woman?
Festivals and awards
73rd Mostra Internazionale d'Arte Cinematografica - In Competition
Toronto Film Festival - Official Selection
Reviews
Vasco Câmara, Público
Piers Handling, Festival de Toronto
Transfuge Magazine
Rui Pedro Tendinha, Diário de Notícias
Manuel Halpern, Revista Visão
Raquel Morais, À pala de Walsh
Cast and crew
With
Reda Kateb
Sophie Semin
Jens Harzer
Nick Cave (Special performance)
A film by Wim Wenders
Script: Wim Wenders
From the play by Peter Handke
Photography: Benoît Debie
Stereography: Joséphine Derobe
Sound: Pierre Tucat, Ansgar Frerich
First assistant director: Leocadie Handke
Editing: Béatrice Babin
Production design: Virginie Hernvann, Thierry Flamand
Costume design: Judy Shrewsbury
Line producer: Thierry Cretagne
Produced by Paulo Branco, Gian-Piero Ringel
A coproduction between Alfama Films Production and Neue Road Movies
In association with Leopardo Filmes
With the participation of the CNC, FFA, Medienboard, Film- und Medienstiftung NRW, RTP
International sales and festivals: Alfama Films
Director's biography
Wim Wenders is one of the most important directors in the world and one of the leading representatives of the "New German Cinema". In addition to the many honors he received during his long career - a Golden Palm for Paris-Texas (1984), the Best Director Award at Cannes for Wings of Desire (1987), the Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival for The Million Dollar Hotel (2000) - he was honored at the 65th Berlin Film Festival for his entire career.
Wenders made the first step of his filmmaking career in 1967 by enrolling in the Munich Film School, while publishing movie reviews and texts on rock music. In the late sixties he directed several short films, including 3 American LPs, from a screenplay by Peter Handke. This was the beginning of their long collaboration. Wenders began his career of director by adapting Handke’s novel Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter (The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick) in 1971.
With this film, he received the International Critics Prize in Venice. The same year, he created the "Filmverlag der Autoren" with 20 other directors to manage together and independently the production, exploitation of the rights and distribution of their own films.
With Alice in the Cities (1973), The Wrong Move (1974) and Kings of the Road (1975), Wenders focused on men who suffered from their own uprooting. He received numerous German and international awards. These three films, as well as the thriller The American Friend (by Patricia Highsmith, 1977) with Dennis Hopper and Bruno Ganz in the lead roles, embrace the post war Germany and its rapid transformation.
In 1978, Wenders went to the United States, invited by Coppola, and began to work on Hammett (1982). Almost simultaneously, he shot a meditation on the last weeks of Nicholas Ray, who had been banned from Hollywood: Lightning Over Water. Then Wenders shot in Portugal The State of Things (1982), a dark meditation on the filmmaker’s craft produced by Paulo Branco, for which he was awarded the Golden Lion for Best Film at the Venice Festival. Ten years later, Wenders returned to Portugal to shoot there Lisbon Story (1994).
In the early 1980s, he took a script born from a collaboration with Sam Shepard, which became Paris-Texas (1984). With this road movie, the filmmaker won, among other prizes, the Golden Palm in Cannes in 1984 and was named Best Director by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.
Back in Germany, Wenders began a new collaboration with Peter Handke for Wings of Desire (1987). The cinematographic tale allowed him to reconnect with the worldwide success. He won the Best Director Award in Cannes, the European Film Awards and the German Film Prize. Followed a second long stay in the United States, beginning in 1996 with The End of Violence. In 2000, Wenders portrayed a tragicomic story inspired by Bono, the U2 singer. In 2002, the Berlin Film Festival awarded its Silver Bear to Wenders for The Million Dollar Hotel.
Throughout his career Wenders shot a number of unconventional documentaries, including Tokyo-Ga (1985), Notebook on Cities and Clothes and Buena Vista Social Club, which has known a triumphant success. His most recent documentaries Pina (2011) and The Salt of the Earth: A Journey with Sebastião Salgado (2015), are as compelling as unexpected successes and were nominated at the Oscars. The Salt of the Earth won the César for Best Documentary Film and was presented in the selection "Un Certain Regard" at the 2014 Cannes Festival where it received the Jury Prize.
Everything Will Be Fine was released in cinemas in France April 22nd, 2015.
