WINGS OF DESIRE

Director: Wim Wenders

1987, Germany, 130, PG-13

Screenwriter: Wim Wenders and Peter Handke.

Cast: Bruno Ganz, Peter Falk, Solveig Dommartin, Otto Sander.

 

WINGS OF DESIRE is one of the greatest films by Wim Wenders, it won him the Best Director Award at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival. Wenders’ war-scarred Berlin is a haunted landscape of the imagination, a place where angels from an unseen world can comfort, but never get close to, the people around them. Bruno Ganz plays an angel named Damiel whose infatuation with a melancholy trapeze artist (Solveig Dommartin) tempts him to join the imperfect realities of life on earth. Playing himself as an actor on location in Berlin, Peter Falk introduces Damiel to the pleasures of mortal existence: “To smoke, and have coffee. And if you do it together, it’s fantastic.” The brilliant mix of black and white and color is the work of Henri Alekan, legendary cinematographer of Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast.

New 4K restoration with 5.1 sound mix provided by the Wim Wenders Foundation and supervised by Wim and Donata Wenders. Funding provided by Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg and the FFA, and by the French CNC.