Wim Wenders spent fourteen years making his new documentary about Swiss architect Peter Zumthor. The film, From Inside Out – The Architecture of Peter Zumthor, will have its world premiere out of competition at the Venice Film Festival. The festival runs from 2 to 12 September 2026.
Who is Wim Wenders
The German director is one of the key figures of New German Cinema. He’s best known for Paris, Texas, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1984. Three years later, he won the Best Director award at Cannes for Wings of Desire.
Alongside his feature films, Wenders also has a long tradition of documentaries about artists. He directed Buena Vista Social Club (1999) about Cuban musicians, Pina (2011) about choreographer Pina Bausch, and The Salt of the Earth (2014) about photographer Sebastião Salgado. More recently, his feature film Perfect Days (2023) drew attention. It became the first non-Japanese film submitted by Japan for Oscar consideration.
Who is Peter Zumthor
The Swiss architect, born in 1943 in Basel, originally trained as a carpenter, an influence still visible in his later emphasis on craft and material. In 2009, he won the Pritzker Prize, architecture’s highest global honour.
Zumthor deliberately runs a small studio so he can stay personally involved in every detail of a building. His best-known works include the Therme Vals spa in the Swiss Alps, Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria, and the Kolumba Museum in Cologne.
Architecture as a bodily experience
Rather than a conventional architectural portrait, Wenders sets out to make Zumthor’s spaces genuinely tangible. He follows the buildings through the people who visit, live in, and use them, as well as the craftspeople who built them. In this way, he captures architecture as something felt with the body and the senses, not just seen with the eye.
The 114-minute film moves between intimate early houses and major commissions. It features Therme Vals, the Kolumba Museum, the Bruder Klaus Field Chapel, and the Steilneset Memorial in Norway. The film also covers the upcoming Wyss Building for the Fondation Beyeler. In addition, it returns to the never-completed Topography of Terror museum in Berlin.
Zumthor and Louise Bourgeois: a memorial at the edge of the world
One of the buildings featured in the film is the Steilneset Memorial. It’s a monument on the island of Vardøya, in Norway’s Barents Sea. The island lies so far east that it sits beyond St. Petersburg, Kyiv, and even Istanbul. The memorial was unveiled in 2011, and it commemorates 91 people, mostly women, along with some men and Indigenous residents, executed for witchcraft in the Finnmark region roughly 400 years ago.
Zumthor designed a long fabric structure here, nearly 400 feet in length. It’s suspended on a wooden, pine-timber frame, and it evokes both a ship and the traditional fish-drying racks common to the region. He also cut exactly 91 small windows into its walls, one for each victim. Through them, views of the surrounding Arctic landscape filter in.
LACMA and Brad Pitt: architecture as a celebrity affair
The section likely to draw the most attention, though, concerns the David Geffen Galleries, the new building for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Zumthor’s first-ever structure in the US.
The project was dogged by years of controversy. Critics pointed out that the new building would, paradoxically, be smaller than the exhibition space it was replacing. It was in this heated atmosphere that Brad Pitt stepped in to defend Zumthor at a pivotal public hearing in 2019, calling the architect “a master of light and shadow.” According to the documentary’s producers, Pitt’s public support was “highly instrumental” in getting the project approved.
Pitt now serves as an executive producer on the documentary, turning what could have been a one-off gesture into a lasting commitment to Zumthor’s work. The building whose fate he once helped secure finally opened to the public just last year, after more than two decades in the making.
Where and when
From Inside Out – The Architecture of Peter Zumthor, Venice Open, out of competition. Official public screening on 6 September 2026 at 2pm in the Sala Grande, with an additional screening on 5 September.
