Shezad is a Pakistani refugee seeking his fortune in Hamburg. At night, he sells roses in pubs. During the day, he is looking for a job. He starts working as a dishwasher and soup cook in a Chinese restaurant. Xiao, the waiter, and Shezad dream of opening their own restaurant. Herder, the janitor of the asylum seekers' home and part-time escape helper, has to go abroad. Shezad takes over his job and finds the money for the restaurant in East Berlin by not entirely legal means. So Shezad and Xiao's dream comes true. However, the day of the opening ends differently than the two of them had imagined.
Five toilets - five stories! This pitch black comedy relentlessly illuminates the darkest corners of society, thereby revealing a colorful potpourri of human perfidy. The five intertwined episodes are staged in the manner of an intimate play, occasionally testing the audiences moral judgment.
In addition to demonstrating the unexpected complexities of individual life paths, THE WILD establishes the possibility of “cinematic space” becoming a type of “third space”. Two seemingly contrasting spaces merge to construct a new space. The first space is the living room of a retired couple. The second space is embodied in Super 8 recordings filmed by the old man during his numerous trips to Africa and Asia during the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s. The pictures show exotic animals which are projected directly onto the walls and furniture of the house. The assembly of these differing spaces does not create a more succinct boundary between them, but rather assists in the mingling of the two spaces. In this fleeting moment of third space, as it is limited by time, a new cinematic reality is formed.
A family reunion aboard a ship becomes a turning point in the life of 39-year-old engineer Markus. When his son Adam (4) gets a little cut after going to the bathroom with his grandmother Renate, Markus recalls for the first time what his mother did to him when he was a little boy. Markus and his wife Monika find themselves confronted with an ugly truth of the kind you wouldn’t think a mother capable of.
After the death of her father Georg Inga Hauck drives together with her son Max in their home village. In her old home she meets Anna Kertesz. Inga's parents had taken Anna 28 years ago after her adult brother Zoltan mysteriously disappeared. Since the same day also Ingas was missing then six-year-old brother Magnus. Inga is being overtaken by her past in her parents' house. Soon her nerves are bare. And every day her memories come back.
Dad is dead. For years he wanted nothing more to do with his children because they didn't agree with his lifestyle. Now daughter Linda alerts the three brothers Joschi, Jakob and Uli, and they all gather together with their spouses Fred and Franziska at the deathbed, which in this case is a new red sofa in the middle of the living room of the family home. The father, a former head physician, widowed for years and suffering from Parkinson's disease, had developed an exuberant old-age virility in which his nurse played no small role.
The two washed-up TV stars Micki and Ginger and the unemployed physicist Reno try to kidnap a young woman. But one of the three kidnappers suddenly doubts the value of the money and drives his accomplices mad. The kidnapped woman is already missing. Three children from a good family are looking for their sister: the dutiful Junior, who counts up his day in seconds, his brother Adrian, who, by contrast, thinks life is one big family outing, and Sophia, the artist, who never finds the real thing in life.
Based on the research for his non-fiction book "Der Baader-Meinhoff-Komplex", "Spiegel" journalist Stefan Aust wrote the screen play to Reinhard Hauff’s controversial feature film that re-narrates the startling trial against the RAF terrorists Baader, Meinhoff, Ensslin, and Raspe. The trial that started in May 1975 in the Stammheim maximum-security prison extended over 192 days and ended with a lifetime sentence for all defendants.
For ten years, the government official George Blake, recruited by the British secret service, also spies for the Soviet Union. Over 40 Western agents lost their lives behind the Iron Curtain as a result. In May 1961, Blake is sentenced to 42 years in prison. But that is not the end of the story. In 1966, Blake escapes from prison to the Soviet Union...
The major flood disaster on February 17, 1962 hit Hamburg completely unprepared. It left 315 dead and 10,000 people homeless. Almost a fifth of Hamburg's urban area was under water. In times of need, the people of Hamburg followed their young police and interior senator Helmut Schmidt, who later became Chancellor, who gained respect nationwide in those days.