Irish Film Institute -PARIS, TEXAS

PARIS, TEXAS

Director: WIM WENDERS

WEST GERMANY-FRANCE • 1984 • FILMED IN ENGLISH • COLOUR • 147 MIN


Paris, Texas is the film that brought director Wim Wenders international acclaim, and one of the keys to its success is Sam Shepard’s script, which stretches Wenders to the limit. Because Shepard’s screenplay explores the split between the ideal of family and the impossibility of sustaining this ideal in practice, Wenders is compelled—for the first time in his work—to confront raw emotion. Travis (Harry Dean Stanton) is discovered wandering in the desert and is picked up by his brother Walt (Dean Stockwell). Four years before, Travis disappeared. His wife Jane (Nastassja Kinski) left their son Hunter (Hunter Carson) with Walt and his wife Ann (Aurore Clement) before she too vanished. In his brother’s home, Travis slowly recovers contact with reality and with his son. When Travis takes his son with him to search for Jane, it means the breaking up of one family in an endeavour to re-establish another. Shepard’s rich screenplay contains many familiar themes and stories within stories about family, home and roots. It is a spiritual odyssey, a sort of pilgrim’s progress that starts literally in the Valley of Death but ends not in the Celestial City but in a Houston that Wenders tartly nicknamed Lego-Land.’

The IFI is pleased to welcome renowned playwright, director and movie star Sam Shepard, who will talk about his work as writer on ‘Paris, Texas’. Mr. Shepard is in Dublin for the Abbey Theatre’s production of his new play ‘Kicking a Dead Horse’.

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