What if a human is a lonesome highway, unaware of their beginning, but knowing their own cities? The taciturn Travis races ahead across the concrete – he wants to rebuild his relationship with his son, who lives in Los Angeles with his brother, and his missing wife Jane. Dust covers his cap, shirt collar, and boots, yet he is determined to reunite his scattered family. Travis’s journey towards forgiveness grips us ever tighter as the characters know more than the viewer: this road leads from nowhere to nowhere.

The road movie gold standard, steadily glimmering in red neon and the dusty glow of the scorching Texas sun. At the beginning of his career, enamoured with American mythology and filmmaking traditions, Wenders reaches maturity in this drama as he unravels the script by actor and playwright Sam Shepard with broad, visually enveloping strokes (cinematography by Robby Müller), exploring the meaning of change, words, and silence. At perhaps the most significant point in his filmography, the delicate character actor and Lynch favourite Harry Dean Stanton, whose face is a landscape in itself, meets the mesmerising Nastassja Kinski, whose pink angora-clad character has become a source of cinematic references. They are some of the human landscapes in the Great Landscape.