Robby Müller is one of the few people in the world who knows how to play the sun. How to catch its rays like butterflies. How to strike its beams like chords. Not only does music reverberate and resonate from these tenderly spun threads of light, as we can see and hear in the opening images of Living the Light when Robby moves his camera, the camera turns into a musical instrument as well. And the whole world dances, radiates, is illuminated.

For her extraordinary film essay, Living the Light, Director and Director of Photography Claire Pijman had access to the thousands of Hi8 video diaries, pictures and Polaroids that Müller photographed while he was at work on one of the more than 70 features he shot throughout his career; often with long term collaborators such as Wim Wenders, Jim Jarmusch and Lars von Trier. The film intertwines these images with excerpts of his oeuvre, thus creating a fluid and cinematic continuum. In his score for Living the Light Jim Jarmusch gives this wide raging scale of life and art an additional musical voice.
It discloses how life and work and art and life again were always inspiring and informing one another. One continuous stream of expressive yet sensitive images that show how the world is best seen through a camera. How the world comes to life (and lives) through a lens. How the roads and hotel rooms he filmed with Wim Wenders were his roads and hotel rooms. How his surroundings travelled from one medium into another. His true destination was always portrayal, revealing what he saw. And in those rooms and on those roads he was drawn to the most reflective of surfaces: windows and mirrors, resulting in an endless flow of self-portraits of the cinematographer as a man with a camera.
With his ground-breaking camerawork, and inventive and innovative lighting methods, his exceptional sense for the depth of colour, and the freedom of framing, plus his on-going quest for simplicity, he has encouraged generations of DoPs to discover their own eye. Besides being a master of the analogue, he became a pioneer of the digital when he shot his first features with Lars von Trier.

His work has been compared to that of painters like Vermeer and Hopper, like him, also masters of light like himself. But even when his films are finished, his images keep on moving. The light never fades because he has always created space for the human story to speak through the images. To come into the light.
Living the Light is the story of that light.

Robby Müller

Jim Jarmusch

Wim Wenders

Agnès Godard

Theo Bierkens

Jay Rabinowitz

Pim Tjujerman

Rüdiger Vogler

Frieder Hochheim

Camilla MacGillavry-Müller

Jimmy Müller

Lars von Trier

Christopher Porter

Director: Claire Pijman

Camera: Robby Müller

Claire Pijman

Music: SQÜRL Jim Jarmusch & Carter Logan

Editor: Katharina Wartena

Produced by: Moondocs

Carolijn Borgdorff

Jorinde Sorée

Co-produced by: Chromosom Film

Alexander Wadouh

Franzis Walther

Stitching Docushot

Sven Sauër

Erno Das