Anna is 60 and her acting heyday is now behind her. She lives on her own but has a friend and confidant in her downstairs neighbour Michel, who is also single. Reluctantly, Anna accepts a job as a language coach for 17-year-old Adrian who has a speech impediment and is something of a misfit. She recognises him as the boy who recently snatched her handbag in the street.

Eight people on a journey across Germany. Each has a destination in mind, each has worries as well as wishes. Fate brings them together. The carpooling agency throws them together in three cars. They have to spend several hours together in a very confined space. A shy wallflower, a pushy swimwear salesman, a boy who wants to get out of the provinces for a weekend... Their lives become intertwined for a few hours during the trip. But how do such different people fit together at all? This question is the source of the movie's suspense.

Theres and Kenneth are both young when they first meet whilst on holiday. They fall in love but are unable to prevent themselves from losing each other. Thirty years later, in another country, another couple: Ariane leaves her husband David because she no longer loves him. The paths they both take lead them to Kenneth and Theres.

A young man feels being watched by his old landlord's vulture-like eye.

Nick Gutlicht lives of illegally selling valuable books, owes money to a bunch of other crooks and has to hide from them. By chance he ends up in the mansion of the famous, now very old philosopher Curt Ledig, who despite the age related forgetfulness and pathological kitchen phobia resists to move to his daughter. Nick is hired by the family as watchdog. Now Curt can work on a presentation for the upcoming symposium, which anybody thinks he's capable of anymore. Nick thinks he has an excellent hiding place. This partnership of convenience of the two individuals quickly develops its own momentum. Curt regards Nick as an exciting research object and subjects him to an absurd therapy. For Nick it's a unique opportunity to fund his finances with Curt's phenomenal library. The strange couple is going through turmoil of incalculable proportions.

Convinced that his daughter has forgotten how to laugh, a father shows up unannounced while she's living abroad and bombards her with outrageous jokes.

Ava is far from happy about having to move in with her mother again after finishing college. A lot has changed since she was a child. Her old room is occupied by her mother's home exercise machine, and Ava's friends have their own lives to worry about. However, her mother has found a new boyfriend who is not much older than Ava herself. Ava finds herself without any prospects for the future and doesn't quite know what to do with her life.

After a 13-year-old student disappears without a trace for a week and suddenly reappears, his mother and teachers are confronted with existential questions that change their whole view of life.

A young woman has inherited her late mother's night kiosk. She tries to overcome her grief and the planned break-up with her boyfriend by having friends and customers tell her stories about happiness, which she records on a video camera. As the tapes pile up, she realizes that the other happiness seekers are also fleeing fate and their loneliness.