Florens Schmidt

On a beautiful spring day, a small village full of eccentric characters wake up to hear Selma has had a premonition: she dreamt of a rare animal again – an okapi. All the village knows this means someone is about to die. Selma’s granddaughter, 11-year-old Luise, and her best friend Martin look on as fears of being the victim of the prophecy throw the village into a frenzy of confusion. But when the premonition comes true, it is young Luise’s world that is suddenly turned upside down. Ten years on from the event that changed her life, Luise lives a quiet life working in a bookstore, until the arrival of an unexpected guest enables her to rediscover how powerful and life-giving love can be.

Thomas Brasch was born as a German-Jewish emigrant in England in order to move to the young GDR with his family at the beginning of the 1950s. His father Horst is primarily interested in helping to build the new German state. But Thomas prefers to realize himself as a writer and in doing so discovers his potential as a poetic rebel. His very first play was banned and soon afterwards he lost his place at the film school. When the tanks of the Soviet Union roll through the Czech capital Prague in 1968, Brasch and his girlfriend Sanda and other students try to call for protest in the streets of Berlin - and fail. His own father betrays him to the Stasi and allows Thomas to go to prison. After being paroled, he continues to try his hand at poet writing about love, revolt and death. In the GDR, however, you don't want to have anything to do with someone like him.

Iman has built his life in Berlin around absence. From his family, from Iran, from being known. He drifts through the city, chasing closeness and solitude. Day in, night out, he works as a caregiver for an old man and at a truck wash. He fills the silence with invented stories and a man he meets for sex at night in a park. On his endless paths through the city, fragments from the lives of other passersby drift alongside him. When his cousin Maneli visits from Tehran, what he left behind quietly returns.

Straight is the story of a messy love triangle between two men and a woman. Nazim (Eralp Uzun) is a hot young Turkish guy involved in petty crime. He goes out each night with his buddies, cruising for girls and dealing drugs in a seedy city square populated with hookers. None of his buddies suspect that on many of those nights he ends up in the arms of men. Since he met David (Florian Sonnefeld) on the street, his hetero façade is rapidly crumbling. His friends seem to pick up on the new vibe and wonder what’s up. David is from a bourgeois Jewish family and slumming it. He hangs out on the street pretending to look for drugs, but what he really wants is Nazim. Their first hookup is alternately hot, tender and filled with guilt. Nevertheless, their affair develops in secret against all odds. Further entangling things is David’s Polish-German girlfriend (Beba Ebner), who is revolting against her strict Catholic upbringing by going out with this punkish Jewish boyfriend.

Two Afro-German half-sisters that never met before, get closer through their father's death, search their roots and find themselves.

At dawn, the paramedics carry the body of a young woman from a villa in the Grunewald forest. Her name is Daisy, she was a successful medical student in her eighth semester. The plot jumps back a few days: Daisy has passed her pathology exam with distinction. Daisy's roommate Marie is celebrating the completion of her medical studies in the villa. A scandal breaks out during the party. Marie's boyfriend of many years, Bubi, flees from a petty bourgeois future at the side of the newly qualified assistant doctor. He leaves the party with a younger student. Despite her outward successes, she seems deeply dissatisfied, alternating between stimulants and tranquilizers and changing her sex partners more and more frequently. She now gets a particular kick out of making the abandoned Marie her lesbian lover.