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Paul Winkelmann is the CEO of a successful business in Hamburg that he took over after the death of his father eight years ago. But he is still strongly dominated by his 78 year old mother who cares for him as a child, and who cannot understand why he took an apartment on his own after all these years. The real "problem" starts when Paul gets to know psychologist Margarethe Tietze whose relationship to her parents is also not so easy after all.
Germany, January 1939: a day in a concentration camp. Subjected to harsh military discipline the hungry prisoners are digging a huge hole and filling it up again. Several are tortured, die of exhaustion, in the electric fence, or are shot.
Iranian director Sohrab Shahid Saless has succeeded in taking on an unusual project — the life and times of a German literary figure — and making it interesting. Christian Dietrich Grabbes lived a very short life in the first half of the 19th century and is primarily known for his satire, skepticism, basurd theater and the fact that he presaged the Postmodern movement in literature. Hannibal and Don Juan and Faust are two of his better-known works. In this docudrama, his Comedy, Satire, Irony and Deeper Meaning is featured partly because it gives a drubbing to the icons of German thought that had a stranglehold on the creative process. One memorable moment in this three-and-a-half-hour story is when the alcoholic writer is caught in the throes of delirium and comes around to see his own mother as a figure of death. The irony is that an Iranian director could capture the spirit and age of a German writer so well
