Painting and film blur into one another in Wim Wenders' documentary portrait of artist Anselm Kiefer, shot to be felt as much as watched.
What is Anselm about?
Rather than narrate a career in order, the documentary moves through Kiefer's monumental canvases, sculptures, and studio spaces the way a visitor might wander a retrospective — circling back, lingering, letting scale do the talking. Wenders shoots the artist's sprawling installations and archives with an eye for texture and weight, treating brushstroke and lead sheeting almost as landscape. The result sits somewhere between essay film and gallery walk-through, less concerned with biography as timeline than with what it feels like to stand inside work built on this scale, and how a lifetime spent returning to memory, history, and materials shapes what ends up on the canvas.
About the cast
Anselm Kiefer appears as himself throughout, with Anton Wenders and Daniel Kiefer also featured in the film — a small, focused cast built around the artist's own presence rather than a traditional talking-heads structure.
Context & significance
Directed by Wim Wenders, Anselm is a France-Germany co-production shot for large-format and 3D presentation, a choice that suits Kiefer's outsized physical works and gives the documentary a spatial quality closer to sculpture than conventional film. Wenders, long associated with both narrative cinema and documentary portraits of artists, approaches Kiefer's practice — steeped in German history, myth, and memory — without reducing it to simple explanation, preferring instead to let the scale and materials of the work carry the meaning. The 3D format is not a gimmick here; it gives the camera room to move through Kiefer's studio complex the way a viewer would move through the actual installations, so depth and distance become part of the film's argument rather than an added effect layered on top of it.
Watching Anselm on Ktime
Anselm streams on K-Time with a free account login, and both a Persian dub and Persian subtitles are available, letting Farsi-speaking audiences follow the documentary's visual essay either in translation or with the original soundtrack intact.