Through the hustle and bustle of the 1982 Cannes Film Festival, several filmmakers, some concerned, some less bleakly inclined, reflect on the future of cinema. At the now-iconic Hotel Martinez, Jean-Luc Godard, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Steven Spielberg, Michelangelo Antonioni, and others enter room 666 one by one. They are seated next to a small TV set and asked to answer  a question: is cinema a language that is about to disappear, or an art that will soon die?

This conceptual chamber drama brings together 20th-century classics, visionary amusement masters, and enfants terribles. Wenders allowed each interviewee to speak for 11 minutes – precisely the length of a 16 mm reel – without prior agreement on what they would say or do in front of the camera, so Werner Herzog’s act of removing his socks is shrewd improvisation. As Wenders later stated in interviews, the responses from his contemporaries surprised him, yet this miniature on the relationship between capitalism and art and the “absurdly numerous moving images” hits with stunning accuracy even 40 years later.