German actress Nastassja Kinski has been urging filmmaker Wim Wenders for years to remove a scene from his 1975 film "The Wrong Move" ("Falsche Bewegung"), in which she appeared topless at age 13.

In the brief scene, her co-star Rüdiger Vogler (then over 30) visits the 13-year-old in her bedroom, where she lies on a bed wearing only panties. The man undresses to his underwear, lies on top of her, slaps her, and caresses her face.

"Although I didn't know much at the age of 13, I could already tell that it wasn't right," Kinski told Süddeutsche Zeitung.

The acclaimed German director first publicly responded to Kinski's demands in 2024, stating he understood her "current perceptions and feelings" and would not film the scene that way today.

In his acceptance speech for the Honorary Prize for Lifetime Achievement at the German Film Awards on May 31 in Berlin, Wenders turned the dispute into a public debate.

He repeated that such a scene would not be done today but raised a larger question: how should one deal with films created in a different era?

"I can't blame the 29-year-old young man I was then, 50 years ago, who made a film of his time; wanting, in a way, to capture the zeitgeist," Wenders said.

He acknowledged the scene causes pain to an actress "whom I deeply admired, and still do," but remains hesitant to edit the film retroactively, calling it a moral question. He called on the German Film Academy to initiate a discussion.

Kinski's lawyer, Christian Schertz, announced a lawsuit would be filed soon if the scene is not removed. "This is not a matter of censorship or cancel culture, as he implied in his speech," Schertz said.

Critics viewed Wenders' appeal to the academy as a "clever maneuver" to diffuse responsibility. They accused him of avoiding direct confrontation with Kinski.

The case echoes ongoing controversies over older films featuring children in sexualized roles, such as Louis Malle's "Pretty Baby" (1978) starring a 12-year-old Brooke Shields, and "The Blue Lagoon" (1980) with a 14-year-old Shields.

Modern productions strictly enforce boundaries for underage actors: guardians on set, explicit parental consent, and professional intimacy coordinators.

Source: www.dw.com