Harald Polzin

With Mike it's anything but round: flat away, job a one-way street, and to make matters worse, his little loser heart still beats for ex-wife Claudia.

A former East German boxing champion reduced to working as a bouncer and debt collector is forced to reflect on his life when he is diagnosed with a fatal disease.

Silvi is in her late forties. Her husband has just left her. Until this point, she was fairly content with her life, but now everything is in ruins. A friend advises her to make a fresh start. But how is that supposed to work? Especially if you see yourself as a team player and there’s no team in sight you would want to join. Driven by a sense of longing, helplessness and curiosity, Silvi tries to make new friends and, in her own, touchingly earnest but also naïve and charmingly uninhibited way, starts to take control of her life. Anonymous sex, cosy romanticism and bondage games catapult her from one emotional disaster to the next. But, thankfully, Silvi is indestructible.

In 1984 East Berlin, an agent of the secret police, conducting surveillance on a writer and his lover, finds himself becoming increasingly absorbed by their lives.