Daily Inspiration Quote by Wim Wenders

Wenders isn’t handing out gold stars for plot twists; he’s staking out an ethic. “Any film that supports the idea that things can be changed” sounds modest, almost soft-focus, but it’s a pointed rebuke to a cinema culture that often fetishizes inevitability: the cool fatalism of noir, the prestige-tragedy loop, the dystopian shrug that mistakes despair for sophistication. He’s framing “great” less as technical mastery than as moral pressure applied to the viewer.

The phrasing matters. “Supports the idea” isn’t “preaches” or “proves.” Wenders isn’t demanding propaganda or tidy redemption arcs. He’s talking about films that create conditions where change feels thinkable: a character chooses differently, a community shifts, a system cracks, a person learns to see. That’s a subtle standard because it rewards movies that open doors rather than slam them with “that’s just how it is.”

Put it in Wenders’ context and the line sharpens. Coming out of postwar Germany and the New German Cinema, he’s long been preoccupied with landscapes of dislocation, consumer drift, and spiritual vacancy. His road movies and city films often start from alienation, then search for a hinge moment: an encounter, an image, a song, a witness that makes life reconfigurable. The subtext is political without being partisan: if images can’t imagine change, they quietly train audiences to accept stasis. For a director obsessed with looking, this is a demand that cinema do more than mirror the world; it should loosen it.