Wenders’ most ambitious, personal and misunderstood film to date remains his visionary epic Until the End of the World, an exhilarating sci-fi romance that offers a dizzying and often uncannily prescient imagination of a technologically mediated image culture, set in that now-long-ago year of 1999. The original story of lovers-on-the-run was co-written by Wenders and the film’s star Solveig Dommartin and then transformed by Wenders and acclaimed Australian novelist Peter Carey into a globetrotting voyage that traces an errant and urgent path across Europe, Asia and the US before reaching its final stage in the vast expanses of the Outback. Intended by Wenders as an “ultimate road movie,” the film was released against the director’s wishes in a truncated 158-minute version and was met with a largely puzzled reception, although the film and its amazing soundtrack (featuring Peter Gabriel, U2, Lou Reed, Nick Cave, REM, Patti Smith and others) immediately found ardent fans. In 2015, Wenders was at last able to release the long-awaited five-hour director’s cut of Until the End of the World, boldly expanding the film’s vast canvas and deepening its many then-strange-now-strangely-true predictions about ecological entropy, virtual currency and the melding of dream imagery into a more hospitable alternate reality.