Der amerikanische Freund (L’amico americano)
by
MOVIE CATEGORY
Jonathan Zimmermann believes that he will soon die of leukemia. The unscrupulous American Tom Ripley learns of this and exploits Zimmermann’s illness for his own purposes. He introduces Jonathan to the underworld figure Minot, who offers to hire the terminally ill man as a professional hit man. He is to be paid appropriately for his work and thus enabled to leave something behind for his wife and their child. What does he have to lose, since he is going to die anyway? A friendship develops between the two very different men, and this ultimately leads Ripley to intervene when Zimmermann proves incapable of carrying out an additional murder.
The cast of the film includes not only the directors Dennis Hopper and Gérard Blain: many of the supporting roles of gangsters are also played by fellow directors, such as Hollywood legends Sam Fuller and Nicholas Ray, as well as Peter Lilienthal, Daniel Schmid, and Jean Eustache.
DIRECTORY
Born in 1945, he came to international prominence as one of the pioneers of the New German Cinema in the 1970’s and is considered to be one of the most important figures in contemporary German film. In addition to his many prize-winning feature films, his work as a scriptwriter, director, producer, photographer and author also encompasses an abundance of documentary films, international photo exhibitions and numerous monographs, film books and prose collections. He lives and works in Berlin, together with his wife Donata Wenders. He studied medicine and philosophy before moving to Paris in 1966 to study painting. His career as a filmmaker began in 1967 when Wenders enrolled at the newly founded University of Television and Film Munich (HFF Munich). Parallel to his studies at the HFF, he also worked as a film critic from 1967 to 1970. Wenders has been a member of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin since 1984, and holds honorary doctorates from the Sorbonne in Paris (1989), the Faculty of Theology at the University of Fribourg (1995), the University of Louvain (2005) and the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Catania (2010). Since 1996 he has been President of the European Film Academy. He teaches as a professor at the University of Fine Arts of Hamburg.
