Fictional story of a traffic accident that triggers a catastrophe near a small village in 1990. A liquefied gas truck collides with a transport truck carrying radioactive material for reprocessing. An accident that was never thought possible by human standards. The radioactivity released must be contained at all costs. Not only the catastrophic consequences of the radiation, but also the panicked, irrational and inhumane behavior of those trapped in the village and the German army are portrayed in an almost unbearable way in this film.

All summer long, a group of people circumnavigate each other. A group of people who are so close and yet so alienated from one another. Their isolated holiday home is the site for a resurgence of smouldering conflicts and lifelong illusions that threaten to wreck the family’s fragile unity forever.

October 1941. Eighteen months into France’s occupation by German troops, young Communist members of the Resistance shoot dead an officer of the German Army. In retaliation, Hitler demands the deaths of 150 Frenchmen, as 'retribution'. The targets are to be mostly young men believed to share the assassins’ political convictions. Most of these men are taken from an internment camp for opponents of the occupation; a 35-year-old French rural administrator is ordered to select the victims. Although the parish priest appeals to their conscience and moral sensibilities, both the German military and their French helpers slavishly follow their orders.

In the last days of WW2, the German minesweeper MX12 is on its way into the enemy’s zone to pick up wounded soldiers. When a radio message proclaims the end of war, the crew demands to break off the risky mission. Only the captain wants to continue.

A plot of land, a house by the lake, its changing inhabitants. This one plot of land reflects 70 years of German history from Weimar, the Nazis, the war, the Soviet occupation and reconstruction to the fall of the GDR.