Klaus-Peter Schmitt

Moscow, the 90s ... A city without a past and without a future. A city that doesn't forgive mistakes. Showing Moscow bohemia, the criminal business: nightlife, easy money, excitement and confusion form the surface of this life. The main characters of the film are businessman Mike and his friend and partner in smuggling Lev, a psychiatrist Mark and his school friend Irina who became the mistress of a nightclub, her two daughters - a crazy Olga working in the same club as a singer, and Masha - the “Moscow Princess” on the threshold of her thirtieth birthday. Love stories smoothly flow into a crime drama.

A handful of disparate people in Berlin are drawn to the same residential hotel in the drama Downhill City. Finnish musician Artsi heads to Berlin in hopes of hitting the big time; needing a place to stay, he takes a room at the Downhill City Hotel and ties to find a market for his music. Meanwhile, another Downhill Hotel resident, aspiring author Fabien, meets a former convict named Sascha who has nowhere to stay and offers to take him in. Peggy, who works at a fast-food restaurant, is unhappy with her boyfriend Hans and finally kicks him out. Peggy meets Artsi when he stops by the burger stand one day, while Hans (who ends up crashing with Sascha and Fabien) starts a new relationship of his own with Doris.

A handful of disparate people in Berlin are drawn to the same residential hotel in the drama Downhill City. Finnish musician Artsi heads to Berlin in hopes of hitting the big time; needing a place to stay, he takes a room at the Downhill City Hotel and ties to find a market for his music. Meanwhile, another Downhill Hotel resident, aspiring author Fabien, meets a former convict named Sascha who has nowhere to stay and offers to take him in. Peggy, who works at a fast-food restaurant, is unhappy with her boyfriend Hans and finally kicks him out. Peggy meets Artsi when he stops by the burger stand one day, while Hans (who ends up crashing with Sascha and Fabien) starts a new relationship of his own with Doris.

The paths of people from various countries cross during the course of one night. They speak different languages, but they are fatefully bound together by the solitary quest for happiness and deliverance. Sloping paths are all that's left for them in an age of lost perspectives, lost refuges and lost homelands. They sink deeper with every movement that should be liberating them. Every gesture of love becomes a gesture of humiliation. The desperate dance of their life has become a passionate dance of death. In the centre of this centrifuge at the end of the millennium the Russian emigrant Valery and his lover Ljuba are turning around each other in a nocturnal round dance of desire and pain, hope and violence and the indestructible will to survive