Wim Wenders' homage to Lisbon and films. A sound engineer obtains a mysterious postcard from a friend who at the moment is filming a film in Lisbon. He sets out across Europe to find him and help him.

German journalist Philip Winter has a case of writer’s block when trying to write an article about the United States. He decides to return to Germany, and while trying to book a flight, encounters a German woman and her nine year old daughter Alice doing the same. The three become friends (almost out of necessity) and while the mother asks Winter to mind Alice temporarily, it quickly becomes apparent that Alice will be his responsibility for longer than he expected.

Medical student Paula wins a place at an exclusive Heidelberg medical school. When the body of a young man she met on the train turns up on her dissection table, she begins to investigate the mysterious circumstances surrounding his death.

A group of angels look longingly upon the life of humans. Berlin now is a very different place: unified in name but overrun with crime, corruption, and—in what turns out to be a key theme here—Americans.

Six days in the life of Wilhelm: a detached man without qualities. He wants to write, so his mother gives him a ticket to Bonn, telling him to live. On the train he meets an older man, an athlete in the 1936 Olympics, and his mute teen companion, Mignon. She's an acrobat in market squares for spare change.

Itinerant projection-equipment repairman Bruno Winter and depressed hitchhiker Robert Lander - a doctor who has just been through a break-up with his wife and a half-hearted suicide attempt - travel along the Western side of the East-German border in a repair truck, visiting worn-out movie theaters, learning to communicate across their differences.

Actors Rüdiger Vogler, Hanns Zischler and Lisa Kreuzer reflect on their work in front of the Robby Müller’s camera for Wim Wender’s seminal road movie KINGS OF THE ROAD (Im Lauf der Zeit, 1976).

Juliane Kostner is an attractive woman in her prime: charming, fashion-conscious, worldly. It's no coincidence that she has been head buyer at a luxury department store in Berlin for 30 years. Juliane's private life, on the other hand, is not quite so rosy. Single Juliane doesn't have a particularly trusting relationship with her grown-up daughter Henrike, for example. But when Henrike, who is heavily pregnant, has to go into hospital after a fainting spell, her husband, the busy pilot Martin, has no choice but to ask Juliane for a favor: She is to look after their two grandchildren for the duration of Henrike's stay in hospital.

In 1933 Nuremberg, successful Jewish businessman Leo Katzenberger owns an apartment building and runs a shoe store. A devoted family man, he has a good relationship with his loving wife Claire. As the climate in Germany grows increasingly dangerous, bombshell Irene moves to the neighborhood. After forming an unlikely friendship, his relationship with Irene is immediately regarded with suspicion.

Following her parents' wishes, spirited seventeen-year-old Effi Briest marries Baron von Innstetten – a former admirer of her mother – who is twenty years Effi's senior. This marriage of prudence heralds the beginning of a humdrum life, far from home, for Effi. Innstetten devotes himself entirely to his political career, and the sleepy small town of Kessin has very little to offer in terms of variety. But then, one day, Innstetten's old regimental comrade, Major Crampas – a charming womanizer – arrives on the scene.