[2][3] Wenders has received three nominations for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature: for Buena Vista Social Club (1999), Pina (2011), and The Salt of the Earth (2014).

[7] He failed his entry test at France's national film school, IDHEC (now La Fémis), and instead became an engraver at Johnny Friedlaender's studio in Montparnasse.

[7] Between 1967 and 1970, while at the HFF, he also worked as a film critic for FilmKritik, the Munich daily newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, Twen magazine, and Der Spiegel.

Shot in 16 mm black-and-white by Müller, the movie exhibited many of Wenders's later trademark themes of aimless searching, running from invisible demons, and persistent wandering toward an indeterminate goal.

Protagonist Hans (Zischler) is released from prison, and after searching through seedy West German streets and bars, he visits an old friend in Berlin.

In 1977 Wenders gained prominence for directing the neo-noir The American Friend, starring Dennis Hopper and Bruno Ganz.

Critic Roger Ebert wrote of the film, "[it's] a movie with the kind of passion and willingness to experiment that was more common fifteen years ago than it is now.

West Germany submitted Wings of Desire for consideration for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, a bid supported by its distribution company.

In 1991 Wenders directed the science fiction adventure drama Until the End of the World, starring William Hurt, Solveig Dommartin, Max Von Sydow and Jeanne Moreau.

In 1997, Wenders directed the American drama film The End of Violence, starring Bill Pullman, Andie MacDowell, and Gabriel Byrne.

Like many other of Wenders's American movies, it was shot in multiple locations, including the Griffith Observatory and the Santa Monica Pier.

[citation needed] Wenders's book Emotion Pictures, a collection of diary essays written as a film student, was adapted and broadcast as a series of plays on BBC Radio 3, featuring Peter Capaldi as Wenders, with Gina McKee, Saskia Reeves, Dennis Hopper, Harry Dean Stanton and Ricky Tomlinson, dramatized by Neil Cargill.

In 2011, Wenders was selected to stage the 2013 cycle of Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen at the Bayreuth Festival.

[28] Wenders had admired the dance choreographer Pina Bausch since 1985, but only with the advent of digital 3-D cinema did he decide that he could sufficiently capture her work on screen.

As of 2015 he served as a Jury Member for the digital studio Filmaka, a platform for undiscovered filmmakers to show their work to industry professionals.

[33] In 2019 Wenders acted as executive producer for his former assistant director Luca Lucchesi's documentary A Black Jesus, which has similar themes to Pope Francis: A Man of His Word.

The film explores the role of religion in communal identity and how this can create or dissolve differences in a small Sicilian town during the height of the refugee crisis.

[35] Wenders has worked with photographic images of desolate landscapes and themes of memory, time, loss, nostalgia and movement.

[7] It became the starting point for a nomadic journey across the globe, including Germany, Australia, Cuba, Israel and Japan, to take photographs capturing the essence of a moment, place or space.

[39] In 2009, Wenders signed a petition in support of director Roman Polanski, who had been detained while traveling to a film festival in relation to his 1977 sexual abuse charges, which the petition argued would undermine the tradition of film festivals as a place for works to be shown "freely and safely" and argued that arresting filmmakers traveling to neutral countries could open the door to "actions of which no-one can know the effects.

It provides a framework to bring together his cinematic, photographic, artistic and literary works in his native country and make them permanently accessible to the public.