Carolyn Genzkow
On a cold, wintry night, Lena shows up on the doorstep of the Rossberg family mansion. She claims her car has broken down, but her arrival is intentional. Lena is in pursuit of Anselm Rossberg, an aged Auschwitz guard who lives with his daughter, Maria. Anselm and Maria both deny Anselm's past, but Lena is determined to get him to confess, even as her own weapon is turned on her and she is forced into a moral dilemma.
Sarah, Gerda and Leonie know each other from the chat room. They meet in a small village and walk together into the woods to commit suicide in a small tent. Before they can start their last journey they see themselves confronted with their decision to die, their thoughts about life and death and their fears.
Erna Krawinkel (Erni Mangold) is going to have her 100th birthday. Basically a reason to be happy but Erna does not want to participate in any celebrations. She disappears instead from the senior residents and flees. Village-helper Katja Baumann (Simone Thomalla) wants to help the old lady but both end up in a house on a mountain which is Erna's former parents house. Together they spend the night in the house. Katja makes Erna talk about her past and her family history.
Hamburg, mid 80s, Alex is a cabby. The sound is hard, pubs are dark and loud, people constantly argue about anything and everything, people smoke all the time, and not just cigarettes. Alex wants love and freedom and sleeps with Dietrich. It's far from being love, but the sex is okay. With Marc, a little person full of dignity, she finds more than that. The rest is struggles with her passengers, the indifferent and the doomed, brutes as other nuisances. This sort of life could go on and on, Alex could drive away from her own life and in doing so lose Marc and not getting rid of Dietrich. Wouldn't there be a small monkey with the same invincible desire for freedom as hers.
It's summer. One endless, sexy party under the open sky. Tina and her friends are living the dream of a whole generation of decadent Berlin-party-kids. But after one excessive night she's haunted by a mysterious ugly creature in nightmares she has. The only person she talks about her fears to is her psychologist. His advice is to confront her fears and to reach out to the creature. At first Tina refuses but after she hears about her parents' plans to put her in a mental hospital she starts talking to the creature. She slowly realizes that the creature is an incarnation of her fears and that it has the same feelings she does. Afraid of being called a freak she starts hiding the creature in her room. After a while she even gets close to it. It's almost like a relationship with a wild stray animal. For the first time in her life, it almost seems as if Tina has the courage to be herself. But then her parents and her friends see the creature…
For almost 30 years, bookseller Jordan has lived and worked in a neighborhood in Berlin that has become a social hotbed. As Jordan witnesses a teenager brutally beating up an older man, he intervenes and files a complaint - with unimaginable consequences ... Director Dror Zahavi ("Everything for my father", "My life - Marcel Reich-Ranicki") succeeded after a screenplay by Jürgen Werner ("Tatort - With a steady hand", "Schimanski - layer in the pit", also with Götz George) an atmospherically tightly staged and outstandingly played portrait of a so-called problem district. Here nothing is glossed over, but instead the reality shown and the powerlessness of our judicial system mercilessly layed bare. A highlight of 2010!
