Wings of Desire is a 1987 German romantic-fantasy film directed by Wim Wenders. (In 1998, an American remake, called City of Angels, was made.) The Culture Club Gallery in Hong Kong will screen Wings of Desire at 8 p.m. on January 31.

Set in West Berlin in the late 1980s, late in the Cold War, the movie follows two angels as they roam the city, unseen and unheard by people, observing and listening to the diverse thoughts of Berliners: a pregnant woman, a painter, a broken man who thinks his girlfriend no longer loves him. Their purpose is not that of stereotypical angels, but to “assemble, testify, preserve” reality.

Along with being a story about two angels, the film meditates on Berlin's past, present and future. The angels always existed -- they were in Berlin before it was a city and even before there were humans.

Purely observers, these angels are invisible to all but children and incapable of physical interaction with the human world. Yet one of them begins to fall in love with a talented, lovely and profoundly lonely circus-trapeze artist.

Culture Club Gallery
Central, Hong Kong

(January 26, 2011)

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