Wim Wenders
Palermo Shooting

There are dreams and there are nightmares, but they are always dreams, and there is reality, sometimes real and sometimes dreamlike.

Campino (whose real name is Andreas Frege, is a German singer and actor, leader of a German punk rock band “Die Toten Hosen”) plays Finn, a professional photographer in existential crisis, who after a close encounter with death due to an almost car accident decides to cut ties with his present by taking a sabbatical period to recover a bit and return to his best.

The story begins far from Palermo, continues in Palermo, and ends in Gangi, a village near Palermo. The decision to head from Germany to this city is perhaps dictated by a boat or a barge that also carries an old 500, which Finn has the chance to photograph as it floats by, and whose name on the bow is precisely Palermo.

Due to nightmares, one often finds themselves in psychedelic situations, and the excellent soundtrack greatly pushes towards these feelings and brings us closer to various encounters with death personified by the great Dennis Hopper (in one of his last films r.i.p.) and open-eyed visions let us see a hologram of Lou Reed conversing with Finn.

Italy or rather Sicily or more precisely Palermo is seen through the eyes of a foreigner and for this reason leaves one fascinated, as I was stunned or more than anything pleasantly surprised to hear at one point Fabrizio De André (r.i.p) singing “Quello che non ho”, who knows why this choice was made by Wim Wenders. Incidentally, at another moment of the film, the album cover is also framed, more than a tribute to my beloved songwriter.

In my opinion, the darts or arrows shot or seen in the sixteenth-century fresco that Flavia (played by the talented Giovanna Mezzogiorno) is restoring, within the film's plot are a kind of unconscious connecting thread that leads to death but also to love or rather to life.

Death, love, life, visions, dreams, nightmares, reality, and introspections, themes also dear to Ernst Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni (r.i.p.) who disappeared on the same day, exactly when the film was shot and to whom Ernst Wilhelm “Wim” Wenders later dedicated it, and that's it.