As she steps into her own breakout role, actor Gala Zohar Martinucci reflects on the haunting beauty of Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire, and its enduring influence
This article is taken from the Spring/Summer 2025 issue of AnOther Magazine:
“Wim Wenders’s depiction of Cold War-era Berlin in Wings of Desire [1987], seen through the eyes of two angels roaming the skies above the city, is extraordinary. It’s partly a shattered wasteland but also the same vibrant, stimulating city I’ve fallen in love with – a place full of surprising encounters and boundless energy.
“The film’s two angels, Damiel and Cassiel – melancholy figures dressed in long overcoats with giant wings – are able to silently observe and comfort the city’s inhabitants without being seen. Riding the U-Bahn beside them, peering into their windows or roving among the lamps and bookshelves of the Berlin State Library, they listen to the inner monologues, thoughts and dreams of these people, witnessing the everyday struggles and messy beauty of human life. During his wanderings, Damiel, played by Bruno Ganz, falls in love with a lonely trapeze artist and becomes fascinated with the mortal experience, torn between his eternal role as an angel and the desire to live as a human being. Wenders’s dreamlike vision makes me feel connected not only to Berlin but also to the world of angels and ancestral spirits. During moments of sadness or anger in my life I’ve often felt the presence of an unseen energy, as if someone was gently touching my shoulder to comfort me. Wenders beautifully captures that concept – of forces beyond our knowledge, hidden layers of meaning and connections that go beyond the visible. Wings of Desire is not just a film to me – it’s an enduring source of inspiration.”
In Arsa, the latest film from the Italian artist partnership Masbedo, which premiered at Rome Film Festival last autumn, a doe-eyed girl gazes at a pebble beach through binoculars. Played by an intuitive Gala Zohar Martinucci, Arsa is an 18-year-old navigating the loss of her artist father. She probes the coastline of Stromboli, the island she grew up on, in search of discarded objects she assembles into ‘monsters’ inspired by the fairy tales her father used to tell her – talismans that guide Arsa along her transition into adulthood. Like her character, Martinucci was partly brought up on an island. Born in Rome in 2004, she moved to Ibiza as a child, raised in a free-spirited household brimming with inspiration by her fashion designer mother and director of photography father. Named after Salvador Dalí’s muse Gala Dalí, Martinucci fell in love with performance at a masterclass led by the actor Willem Dafoe in the Italian capital in 2022 and has more recently studied at Rada in London. Her acting career began at the Roman location of New York’s Duse International Centre of Cinema and Theatre, directed by its co-founder Francesca De Sapio (the young Carmela Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part II), before she made her feature debut with a role that mirrors her own deep attachment to island life.
Hair: John Allan using L’ORÉAL PROFESSIONNEL. Make-up: Claire Urquhart at Julian Watson Agency using YSL BEAUTY. Set design: Olivia Giles at Jones Management. Hand-printing: Merrick d’Arcy-Irvine
This story features in the Spring/Summer 2025 issue of AnOther Magazine, which is on sale internationally on 6 March 2025. Pre-order here.
