Past Event22 Jul - 27 Jul 2018

Wings of Desire

No longer available

The Civic

Film

Two angels watch over a divided Berlin in Wim Wenders’ visually astonishing city symphony from 1987 – restored 30 years later, under his direction, to look and sound better than ever in this glorious 4K presentation.

For many the highlight of this year’s Berlinale was the premiere of this dazzling new 4K restoration of Wim Wenders’ spectacularly aerial Wings of Desire. Shot in Berlin two years before the fall of the Wall, it’s a palpably humanistic film purporting to see into the anxious souls of city dwellers through the eyes of angels. One of them (Bruno Ganz) hankers to become human and taste the coffee. The surround-soundscape is as gloriously untethered as the film’s floating camera, a symphony of voices, music and urban ambience cradling the spoken poetry of Peter Handke’s script. Lyrically articulating a profusion of existential doubts and fleeting sensory delights, it’s one of the great Rorschach test movies, many things to many people – and incidentally a must for Nick Cave completists.

No longer subject to the intermediate steps entailed in printing black and white imagery on colour film stock, the digital restoration, scanned from the original negative, renders the legendary cinematography of Henri Alekan even more vividly than when we first showed the film in 1988. Don’t miss your chance to experience it on the giant Civic screen.  

“It’s full of astonishingly hypnotic images… and manages effortlessly to turn Wenders’ and Peter Handke’s poetic, literary script into pure cinematic expression.” — Geoff Andrew, Time Out

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