When film director Wim Wenders first saw choreographer Pina Bausch’s work, in 1985, he was profoundly moved in a way that he couldn’t explain or understand.

“I was shattered, shocked, crying like a baby,” the celebrated auteur of Paris, Texas and Buena Vista Social Club says. “It was more emotional than dance had ever been for me.”

He took years to figure out why. “Pina said it the best possible way,” Wenders says. “She wasn’t interested in how her dancers move but in what moves them. She really looked at dance as something that tells about us, who we are, what we feel.”

Now, more than a quarter century later, Wenders has illuminated the emotional power and mystery of Bausch’s work in Pina, his 3D tribute to the legendary German dance-theater choreographer. The movie, which opens Friday at the Coral Gables Art Cinema and the Regal Cinema South Beach, has been nominated for an Oscar for Best Documentary, acclaimed for its groundbreaking technical craftsmanship and beauty — and as the first 3D film to use the genre’s striking visual qualities for more than gasp or giggle inducing thrills.

With Pina, Wenders, 68, not only ventured into another visual and cinematic dimension but also a new emotional dimension as well. His film brings Bausch’s dreamlike dance theater to vivid life in a way that matches and even surpasses its power in the theater, and it brings her work to a much larger audience than the contemporary dance lovers who had long admired her. (Opening weekend at the Coral Gables cinema includes a video Q&A with Wenders and a tribute performance by Miami choreographer Octavio Campos, who worked in a German troupe similar to Bausch’s, on Friday; and a panel discussion on Bausch’s work on Sunday).

Ironically, and sadly, Wenders’ achievement came without Bausch. The choreographer died in 2009, just two days before filming on Pina was slated to start. Her death seemed to cut off a decades-old dream of the two German artists, who had become close friends and had talked for years of making a film. Wenders was finally persuaded to try when he saw U2’s concert film, U2-3D, in 2008. But the pair’s careful planning was derailed when Bausch died suddenly, just days after being diagnosed with cancer, on June 30, 2009, at the age of 68.

At first, the desolate Wenders abandoned the project. “It was such a shock, because we had dreamt of it together for so long,” he says, speaking from his office in Berlin. “And just before we were about to start, it was too late. So I pulled the plug and walked away.”

He was inspired to return by Bausch’s dancers in the Wuppertal Dance Theater, a devoted crew of 37 drawn from around the United States, Europe, Latin America and Asia who had worked with Bausch for years, even decades, in the small German city of Wuppertal. The night Bausch died, they performed, vowing to continue with her work.

“They were in tears but onstage,” Wenders says. “And it slowly dawned on me that there was another film to be made. Not the film I would have made with Pina — that was gone. But a film that I could make with the dancers, for Pina. I realized how shocked and lost they were. They had never been able to say good-bye or thank you.”