Nina, a mentally ill teenage orphan, starts a new job as a garden cleaner when she meets Toni. They fall in love but soon Toni starts betraying Nina. Meanwhile, Francoise is picked up at a Berlin psychiatric hospital by her husband, Pierre. After spotting Nina, Francoise believes that she has found her kidnapped daughter Marie, but no one believes her.

An introverted insurance executive at a car rental service is annoyed by his hyperactive, garrulous coworker, but the two end up becoming friends.

Ina, just released from prison, returns to the place of her childhood in search of life and meets the occasional desperado Domühl in her mother's house, which has been empty for thirty years. Hagen, a mentally handicapped resident, also ends up in this unusual landscape somewhere in the middle of nowhere south of Berlin in search of his uncle.

Meetings with readers, acquaintances and contemporaries of writer Uwe Johnson at the places where he lived. Volker Koepp, who is also from Pomerania, looks for Johnson’s sophisticated literary voice in the landscapes of the region they both stem from.

An eleven-year-old Turkish boy, two young men from a small town, and a cuckolded policeman from the sticks all find their way to Berlin on May Day, where, in the district of Kreuzberg, emotions come to the boil every year.

The story of the stubborn and aggressive teenager Anke, who after the suicide of her father many years ago lives alone with her mother in a small town in northern Germany.

A snack bar owner smokes with his Muslim neighbor in the stairwell of their apartment building at night. Her husband is his good friend. They draw closer to one another as the nights go on and look out over the city to the dark satellites, the brutalist concrete buildings on the outskirts of the city - relics of the GDR past. A security guard watches over Objekt 95, a satellite town with a residential complex which many foreigners call home. While on patrol at night, he gets to know a young Ukrainian woman who fled her home country when the war broke out. He wants to protect her, while his friend, the “old security guard”, radios to him from an abandoned Russian barrack night after night. A woman from the train cleaning service drinks in a train station bar after her night shift. There, she meets a hairdresser. The two of them become friends and spend many nights together in the station. Every night, her desire grows even greater for this woman who is exactly as lonely as she is.

"In the Shadows" slithers through underworld Berlin in grand style. En route to a twisty finale, German writer-director Thomas Arslan keeps his audience glued to the increasingly desperate actions of Trojan, a thirtysomething career criminal whose latest job slowly catches up with him.

When a folk high school is turned into an internment camp for German refugees, the headmaster couple Jakob and Lis and their children are thrust into an impossible situation. Should the family help the refugees — or stand firm in the Danish resistance against the Germans?