Event

Wings of Desire

Wings of Desire is one of cinemas loveliest city symphonies. Bruno Ganz is Damiel, an angel perched atop buildings high over Berlin who can hear the thoughtsfears, hopes, dreamsof all the people living below. But when he falls in love with a beautiful trapeze artist, he is willing to give up his immortality and come back to earth to be with her. Made not long before the fall of the Berlin wall, this stunning tapestry of sounds and images, shot in black and white and color by the legendary Henri Alekan, is movie poetry. And it forever made the name Wim Wenders synonymous with film art.

"Theres little doubt as to the originality of the experience from the very first airborne camera patrols of autumnal cold-war Berlin. In Wenderss silvery black-and-white view, this is the paradigmatic city wasteland of its age, still war-torn and withstanding a historicized physical and political schizophrenia like no other, symbolized, like the elephant in the parlor, by the wall itself, snaking through the urban spaces covered with graffiti, obliterating your view, wherever you stand, of the citys other half. This cognitively dissonant urban experiment had frequently been the grim arena for sixties spy noir, but never had we seen Berlin become Berlin so clearly, so eloquently before." - Michael Atkinson, Wings of Desire: Watch the Skies

"Wings of Desire is one of Wenders's most stunning achievements." - Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

"One of the few truly great movies to come out of the '80s." - Douglass Pratt, Hollywood Reporter