It is the spring when Iris is 9 years old. It is the spring when Iris is in love for the first time. And it is also the spring when her mother again begins to cry, when the Grandmother is desperate and when the teacher Mrs Linke wants to rehearse a fairy-danse at school. Above all it is the spring when Iris is deciding that she wants to become a man when she grows up because life as a man is easier.

Daniel (12) and his seventeen-year-old brother Patrick live together in a tower block in Germany. As Daniel suffers more and more from Patrick's tyranny, he believes to have found a friend in Bernd, a heroin junkie from the area.