“It’s hard to think of another movie of its era that makes the viewer so fully feel like a denizen of its setting; the roving, dollying, craning camera makes angels of us all.”
Unbeknownst to the inhabitants of West Berlin, their lives are watched over by angels, reading their thoughts and offering silent consolation where required. When one of the angels (Bruno Ganz) falls in love with a trapeze artist, he sacrifices his wings for mortality, stepping out of the monochrome world of the angels and into the colourful world of the circus and Berlin. Featuring memorable cameos from Peter Falk and Nick Cave (& his Bad Seeds), Wings of Desire is a melancholy rumination on life and loves in a divided city and arguably Wim Wender's masterpiece (and makes for a great companion-screening to Wender’s latest film, Perfect Days)
