Wings of Desire

An angel (Bruno Ganz) soulfully watching over the stranded citizens of West Berlin is tempted by the pleasures of the flesh when he falls in love with a trapeze artist (Solveig Dommartin). Wenders’ profoundly moving and often magical modern fairytale is an extraordinary essay on the weight of history and memory. Shifting between black-and-white and colour, it evokes both Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life and Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death.

Now itself a significant artefact of a soon-to-be united Berlin, it features Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Crime & the City Solution, Curt Bois and Peter Falk. Co-written by Peter Handke and shot by Henri Alekan.