Directed by Wim Wenders and Nicholas Ray • 1980 • West Germany
Starring Wim Wenders, Nicholas Ray, Susan Ray

Wim Wenders’s collaboration with legendary Hollywood iconoclast Nicholas Ray (THEY LIVE BY NIGHT, REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE) is an unclassifiable fusion of personal documentary, film-within-a-film metacinema, and almost unbearably intimate meditation on mortality. Made during the last months of Ray’s life as he was dying of cancer, LIGHTNING OVER WATER follows the two filmmakers as they set out to make a narrative film together—a project increasingly threatened by the older director’s failing health and by Wenders’s own ethical crisis over turning his camera on a dying man.