The third entry in Wenders’ road movie trilogy, Kings of the Road follows a friendship between Bruno, a.k.a. King of the Road (Rüdiger Vogler, Alice in the Cities, Wrong Move), who repairs film projectors, and a psychologist, Robert, a.k.a. Kamikaze (Hanns Zischler, the lead in Wenders’ Summer in the City), who is fleeing from his own past. When Robert drives his old Volkswagen into a river, he is fished out by Bruno. This is the beginning of their shared journey through a German no-man’s-land—before writing the script, Wenders scouted a route through all of the towns along the Wall that still contained a movie theater—a journey that leads them from the Lüneburg Heath to the Bavarian Forest. The van filled with film projectors in the back becomes a metaphor for the history of cinema—it is no coincidence Kings of the Road is dedicated to director Fritz Lang (M). This “men’s story” also speaks to the themes of the absence of women, of loneliness, and of a struggling, postwar Germany. At one moment in the film, Bruno says to Robert: “The Yankees have colonized our subconscious.”