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Fantasy drama

Wings of Desire

Year
1987
Director
Wim Wenders
Length
Not established

An angel listening to Berlin’s private thoughts begins to long for weight, colour, touch, and one mortal life.

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Language
Spanish, German, French, English, Turkish, Hebrew, Japanese
GentleRomanticBeautiful Great first watch · Moderate Fantasy drama
Original illustration for Wings of Desire: A Berlin cityscape emerges from a giant opened book, a small suspended trapeze arcs through the sky above rooftops and a single copper feather drifts close to foreground.

Image: Monocurator · source · Original Monocurator artwork

What to expect

Wenders makes black-and-white perception feel spacious rather than deprived, then gives colour a precise dramatic meaning. The city becomes a field of overheard loneliness joined by the possibility of attention.

How to ease in

The film drifts among strangers before its romance takes shape. Let those brief interior voices establish what the angel’s endless observation can and cannot provide.

Heads-up

A quick, non-exhaustive note Includes suicide, wartime memory, depression, death, and prolonged melancholy.
Momo's Note May contain spoilers Who is Momo? →
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I love that becoming human is imagined through small sensations before grand declarations: cold hands, coffee, blood, weight. Mortality arrives as texture.

— Momo

Momo thinking about this film

Credits & versions

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