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Land of Plenty trailer

A View from Outside: An Interview with Wim Wenders - By Spencer Lewerenz

The most urgent reason for me to want to make this movie [Land of Plenty] was that I felt my religion was somehow hi-jacked. All of a sudden, "Christian" meant right-wing, conservative, even fundamentalist. A total perversion of all Christian values had taken place.

For instance: The one thing Christ repeated more often than anything else, time after time after time, was his solidarity with the poor and underprivileged. In today's America, the rich get richer. Politics, budgets and laws are not in favour of the poor. On the contrary, poverty is constantly ridiculed, overlooked, downplayed. That's not Christian, at least not in my book.

Starting a "preventive war" (unheard of in the history of America) cannot be Christian, either, and nothing in the New Testament, not one word, justifies it. But even worse, bluntly and deliberately lying to the American people about the very reason to start such an ugly war, that is definitely not Christian!

You see, I had to show another idea of Christianity, and I did so in Lana. She's not Mother Teresa, she's neither a saint nor an angel, she has no "power" whatsoever, but in her life, her faith and her actions coincide. That's what I reproach to the "Christians" governing the country. They use the words, but their actions speak the opposite, and much louder.

…………..They have usurped the Christian faith and turned it into some sort of intolerant machine. Martin Luther King, if he were still living, could have made that more apparent than anybody else. His words still ring true: "Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that." There's a lot of darkness today that prevents people from even trying to understand each other.