Dappled sunlight through the leaves. The texture of the newsprint against my fingers as I pick up the morning paper. Taking a seat at an empty cafe table, greeted with quiet warmth. The touch of the cup against my lips. Coffee, warm or cold, sliding down my throat. Late winter, camellia blossoms falling whole with a soft, heavy thud, as if the flower has decided, all at once, to return to the earth. Soil beneath my feet on a walk. The earthy scent rising from damp ground after an early summer rain.

They are the kinds of moments an angel in “Wings of Desire” longed to experience in the flesh, so much so that he chose to abandon immortality for them. Thirty-six years later in “Perfect Days,” the camera stays with a middle-aged man, Hirayama, who lives on, finding quiet solace by lingering in such moments, even under the steady weight of ordinary days.

The appointment of Wim Wenders, the director of the two films, as Jury President of the 2026 Berlinale therefore goes beyond the role itself. At a moment when experience is increasingly flattened into data, his cinema remains quietly attentive to the bodily acts of meeting the world.

“Now, now, and now. I would like to be able to say it with every step, with every gust of wind,” the angel says. The middle-aged man goes to a park for lunch on workdays, lifts his gaze toward the sky, and captures the landscape with a small, old-fashioned camera that fits in the palm of his hand. The images are later developed at a local photo lab and placed in boxes, each one labeled by date.

The boxes occupy space in a corner of the room. They do not vanish with a swipe. They age. As objects that are carried and accumulated, they become part of his days and, over time, his life. In the bodily encounter between the self and an object, experience settles. It does not merely pass through us. It leaves a trace.

In an age of “the withering of direct experience,” as Christine Rosen puts it, we often seem to forget that “we have bodies.” To have a body is to inhabit sensation and labor, through which life begins to acquire texture and gravity.

Much of contemporary life allows increasingly little room for bodily contact with the world. Feeling and savoring such moments often seem less valuable than speed, convenience and ceaseless movement. As a result, we come to skip what is quiet, tactile and slow, the very things that may make us fully human.

We wake to a screen instead of waking into the day itself. Our thumb moves before a foot does. The day becomes something we scroll through before we have even entered it.

Wim Wenders moves in the opposite direction. The power of his films lies in being here in the flesh and staying with what surrounds us. For him, contact is not merely tactile but also ethical. It is a refusal to treat others as things to consume, use, or ignore. It is a willingness to let them carry weight and give texture to our day, through which we learn to live in relationship with the world.

In “Perfect Days,” the camera moves in close on Hirayama’s face, then closer still on his ear. What enters it is not an alarm or the buzz of a phone but the soft sweep of a broom. An old man is cleaning the street at dawn. Listening, Hirayama opens the day and moves through the small routines of everyday life. In “Tree” by Aya Koda, a book he reads throughout the film, rain, drought, wind, illness and sunlight shape the density and width of each tree ring. So do his days.

In Wenders’ cinema, perfection does not imply impeccability. For him, living not flawlessly but fully seems to be the closest thing to perfection. And that may be the very wonder of being human.

The 2026 Berlinale unfolds within the context of these broader questions and tensions of our time. This year’s edition is expected to feature films that explore recurring concerns visible in the major competition titles and the works of their directors. Many of them focus on the restoration or breakdown of family and relationships, questions of identity and belonging, the individual within war, politics and history, and the lives of social outsiders and the lonely.

More than anything else, however, this Berlinale may become a rare public space where we relearn how to look, how to listen and how to stay. Not as a nostalgic retreat from technology, but as a renewed attention to living as embodied beings moving through the world.

Bae Su-kyeong

Bae Su-kyeong is a freelance journalist residing in Europe. The views expressed here are the writer's own. — Ed.


khnews@heraldcorp.com