Modern dance; not an art form that will draw punters in droves to the cinema. Not an art form that I particularly cared about before watching Pina, the latest film by Wim Wenders, visionary German director of Buena Vista Social Club, Paris Texas and some U2 music videos.

But then something happened, no doubt thanks to the skills of Wenders who has made Pina into the most extraordinary film you will have seen in 3D, and of course no doubt thanks to the skills of choreographer Pina Bausch, who this film is about and who sadly died during the course of its making.

I may not be a fan of modern dance, but I recognised Bausch’s work from a brief scene in Pedro Almodovar’s Talk To Her, where a character goes to watch a dance show and tears stream down his face as a man clears a path of chairs for a woman flinging herself across the stage in blind panic.

That dance is repeated in full here in Pina, and we see archive footage of Bausch spliced together with the work of her multinational company. We even watch tiny dancers inside a box before zooming into the action.

We follow the dancers to diverse locations: the side of a quarry, a gushing river, a monorail above a city. Some particularly compelling dancing happens on a stage covered in water, as seen on the poster above, which splashes out of the screen.

The dancers are all performing routines that Pina devised or worked with them on, or which were inspired by her brilliance. Occasionally we see these dancers as talking heads, but they are not talking to the camera, rather listening and absorbing their own recorded words as we listen back to them together.

There are jumps in the air and jumps in time and space. As a viewer, we are both inside and outside the action, sometimes watching dancers from afar, at other times being so close to them we can see their goose bumps.

It reminded me a lot of White Caps by Bristol’s Champloo Dance Company last year at the Old Vic, where video was projected onto a screen before melting away to reveal two dancers in front of us, on stage in real life.

Pina may be projected onto a flat screen, but Wenders’ mastery of the new 3D medium was such that this was a truly immersive, totally mesmerising, experience.

Pina is showing now at the Watershed. Click here for more information.