General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 202610 min read

Pina (피나)

Pina (피나) is a 2011 German documentary film directed by Wim Wenders, a tribute to the modern-dance choreographer Pina Bausch (1940–2009) performed by her company, the Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, and shot in stereoscopic 3D.¹ Wenders and Bausch had planned the film together, but Bausch died in June 2009, days before principal photography was to begin, and Wenders completed it as an homage.¹^•² The film was nominated for the 2012 Academy Award for Best Documentary, Features and won the 2011 European Film Award for Best Documentary.³

Key fact	Detail
Director / subject	Wim Wenders; a portrait of choreographer Pina Bausch and her Tanztheater Wuppertal ensemble¹
Country, year, format	Germany/France, 2011, feature-length documentary shot in 3D⁴
Works featured	Le Sacre du Printemps, Kontakthof, Café Müller, and Vollmond, plus outdoor solos and duets around Wuppertal⁵
Bausch's death	June 2009, at 68, from cancer diagnosed less than a week earlier, days before filming was to start²
Key crew	Cinematography Hélène Louvart and Jörg Widmer; director of stereography Alain Derobe; editor Toni Froschhammer; producer Gian-Piero Ringel¹
Critical reception	Metascore of 83 from 32 reviews⁶
Major awards	Oscar nominee, Best Documentary, Features (2012); European Film Award for European Documentary (2011); German Film Award in Gold, Best Documentary (2011)³
Home media	The Criterion Collection, Spine #644, two-disc Blu-ray and Blu-ray 3D director-approved edition¹

Spoilers

Plot

The film opens in Wuppertal, the industrial German city where Bausch's company is based, with the ensemble's procession. Lutz Förster leads the dancers in a long circle around the theater stage, every one of them repeating four gestures that stand for spring, summer, autumn, and winter.²¹ Then the pieces begin, and the first is the most startling.

The Rite of Spring sequence is the film's centerpiece, and Wenders shoots it as pure ordeal. Bausch's 1975 version is set to Stravinsky, and it opens with men and women dancing in groups across a stage carpeted in dark peat soil.²² The drama narrows to one woman, marked for sacrifice, and the man who accepts her hand and then hands her over. The choreography circles the same terror again and again: she is chosen, she flees, she is caught, the offer of escape is made and withdrawn. The dancers hurl themselves to exhaustion and then past it, and in 3D the volume of each leap and the depth between bodies upstage and down become physical facts rather than flat images.

From there the film alternates between the repertory and the dancers themselves. In Café Müller, blindfolded figures drift through a stage cluttered with chairs that a woman frantically keeps clearing out of their path, an image of love as the removal of obstacles for people who cannot see them. Kontakthof unfolds in three different versions: performed by the original ensemble, by amateur dancers aged 65 to 80, and by teenagers aged 14 to 18, so that the same choreography of courtship and exposure is lived by three generations.¹⁹ Vollmond brings water pouring across the stage, dancers skidding and splashing through it under a huge projected moon, the most tactile and playful of the four works. Bausch herself had selected all four pieces with Wenders before her death.²³

Between the pieces, the dancers testify. There are no critics, no historians, no narration. One by one, in German, Portuguese, Korean, French, Spanish, Italian, or English, a dancer looks into the camera and says a few sentences about Bausch: about fear, about being seen, about a rehearsal in which she said almost nothing and changed everything. Each fragment lands immediately after we have watched that same dancer leap, fall, or tremble on screen, so the words and the body corroborate each other. Bausch appears only in archival footage, prompting dancers with questions rather than instructions, smoking through rehearsals, rarely explaining.

The outdoor solos carry the same logic into the city. A dancer performs on a sidewalk while traffic waits; another rides the glass-sided monorail, moving above the streets in a slow lateral glide that only 3D can make felt. Other sequences unfold at traffic intersections, on escalators, in parks, disused factories, and swimming pools.²⁴^•²³ Wuppertal, Bausch's creative home for more than 35 years, becomes an extension of her stage.²⁵

The ending returns to the procession. The performers move out of the theater and into the distance along a man-made ridge guarded by a line of totemic sculptures, still repeating the four seasonal gestures, and the film closes on Bausch's words on screen: "Dance, dance, otherwise we are lost."²¹ What first read as career reminiscence is revealed as eulogy; the sacrifice repeated nightly in the Rite plays as a company insisting the work outlive its maker. The film never dramatizes her death or stages grief. It simply lets the dedication sit on screen and do its work.

Characters

Pina Bausch (in archival footage) is the film's absent center: a silhouette with a dark bob and a cigarette, asking questions in rehearsal, rarely answering any. Her presence is felt through the dancers' faces and the exactness of the repertory.

Josephine Ann Endicott (as herself), a longtime principal of the company, appears in the Café Müller material and in testimony, one of the dancers who carried Bausch's works for decades.

Dominique Mercy (as himself), another veteran of the ensemble and later its co-director, speaks about working with Bausch and performs in the repertory sequences.

Pau Aran Gimeno (as himself), a younger company member, is among the dancers whose spoken fragment and dancing are paired, representing the generation that inherited the work.

Interpretations and controversies

The main debate among critics concerns the film's refusal to explain. Viewers who come to Bausch cold get no dates, no history of Tanztheater, and no account of why these works scandalized audiences when new; Wenders chose immersion over information. Others note that the dancers' testimonies are uniformly reverent, making the portrait of Bausch border on hagiography. Defenders argue that the absence of expert commentary is the film's thesis: the knowledge lives in these specific bodies, and the film records the handoff rather than the biography.

Origins

Wenders first saw the Tanztheater Wuppertal perform in 1985, when his girlfriend dragged him to a show he expected to find boring. He described the experience as life-changing, saying that in 40 minutes Bausch had shown him more about men and women than the entire history of cinema, and the two began planning a film together the next day.⁷ Bausch set two ground rules: no biography of her and no interview with her. She wanted the film to be about the work.⁷^•⁸

The 3-D decision. The project languished for roughly two decades because Wenders felt he lacked a visual language for filming dance. In 2007 he saw the concert film U2 3D at the Cannes Film Festival and concluded that digital 3D was the answer; he called Bausch to say the film could now be made, and pre-production began that summer.²^•⁹^•¹⁰ Early screen tests with the stereoscopy pioneer Alain Derobe showed depth and space beautifully but rendered fast movement poorly, and the crew had to find the right combination of shutter speed and lenses while avoiding lateral pans that blurred the image.²

Bausch's death. The first rehearsal was scheduled for early July 2009. Bausch died in late June 2009, at 68, from cancer that had been diagnosed less than a week earlier, and Wenders pulled the plug on the production.²^•¹¹ After attending a memorial two months later, he decided to relaunch the film as a way to ground the company and do something for Pina; interior filming began in October 2009.² Company member Julie Shanahan, then in her 24th year with the ensemble, described making the film so soon after the death as a kind of salvation that gave the dancers something to concentrate on.²

Structure and content

The film is built from performances rather than conventional biography. It presents excerpts from four of Bausch's pieces, Le Sacre du Printemps, Kontakthof, Café Müller, and Vollmond, performed at the Tanztheater Wuppertal, with longtime company members recreating their original roles.⁵^•⁴ Kontakthof is shown in the three versions Bausch premiered in 1978, 2000, and 2008: first with her dancers, then with non-professional performers aged sixty-five and over, and then with teenagers.¹²

Dancers speak without speaking. Between the dance excerpts, company members appear in close-up, gazing silently at the camera while recorded voiceovers recount their memories of working with Bausch, often over decades.⁵^•¹³ The dancers recall her sparse instructions, among them "Dance for love," "Go on searching," and "What are we longing for?"⁵ Her motto "Dance, dance, otherwise we are lost" frames the film.¹⁴

Wuppertal as a stage. Alongside the stage pieces, the film stages solos and duets outdoors across the industrial city of Wuppertal: a dancer on pointe with raw veal in her shoes in front of a factory, a performer on the grass verge of a dual carriageway, dances at the city's monorail and on a quarry ridge, and a man dancing near a cliff edge.⁵^•⁷^•¹⁵ Bausch herself appears only in archival footage and a few inserted clips of her dancing or sitting behind her desk.⁵^•¹⁶

The 3D cinematography

Wenders said he set out to invent a different kind of 3D, one that was not effect-driven, was gentle to the eyes, and was almost forgotten after a few minutes, because the attraction of the film was the dance itself rather than the technology.⁷ Cinematographers Hélène Louvart and Jörg Widmer moved the camera with the dancers rather than holding a fixed view from the auditorium, and reviewers noted that the camera work has a choreography of its own.¹⁷ Wenders later admitted technical limits: shooting at 24 frames per second blurred fast movement, and the footage looked better at 48 fps, a speed projectors of the time did not accommodate.¹⁸

Critical opinion of the format varied. The Los Angeles Times critic Kenneth Turan called it the most exciting use of 3D since Avatar, and several reviewers praised the depth and immersion it gave the dance;¹⁹^•⁶ the trade paper Computer Graphics World argued the film was a lesson in what not to do in 3D and would probably be better seen in 2D.¹⁸ Wenders said after the experience that he had no plans to shoot in 2D again.⁷

Reception and awards

The film premiered out of competition at the 2011 Berlin International Film Festival and was an official selection at Telluride, Toronto, and New York.²⁰^•¹⁴ It received a Metascore of 83 based on 32 reviews, with reviewers praising its accessibility to viewers unfamiliar with modern dance and its use of 3D.⁶ It was Germany's official entry at the 84th Academy Awards.⁷

Its awards record includes 10 wins and 27 nominations overall.³ The Academy Award nomination was for Best Documentary, Features, credited to Wim Wenders and producer Gian-Piero Ringel.³ It won the European Film Award for European Documentary (2011), the German Film Award in Gold for Best Documentary (2011), the Guild of German Art House Cinemas Best Documentary prize, and a Camerimage award for Best 3D Documentary Film for cinematographer Hélène Louvart, and it was nominated for the BAFTA for Best Film Not in the English Language.³

Home media

The Criterion Collection released Pina as Spine #644 on a two-disc Blu-ray and Blu-ray 3D director-approved special edition, with a high-definition digital master approved by Wenders, an audio commentary, deleted scenes, behind-the-scenes footage, and an essay by the novelist and essayist Siri Hustvedt.¹

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Films by genre, form, and subject › Documentary and biographical films › Biographical films of musicians, artists, and writers › Biographical films about visual and performing artists

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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