Emily, a child, stays with her bourgeois grandparents during frequent periods when her mother makes films. Isabelle wraps a picture, flies to her childhood home to pick up Emily, and plans to leave for her place in France. Old wounds between Isabelle and her parents open around Isabelle's life style. It's also apparent that Isabelle's mother, Paula, is unhappy - with her husband and with her youthful hopes dashed when she became pregnant with Isabelle. Unbeknownst to Isabelle, the co-star of the film she's just made has followed her, checked into a nearby hotel, and wants to begin an affair, even though he's married. Can Isabelle sort it out? What's best for Emily?
The aristocratic families of Rossitz and Warwand, who are relatives, have started to treat each other with mistrust and hatred, since a testamentary contract has stated, that the complete goods will be inherited to the respective surviving line. At the same time the young generation is in love, how can the tender ties between Agnes of Warwand and Ottokar of Rossitz be protected? Killed by their own fathers, they lie in their blood. A radical drama about the term "family". (www.filmgalerie451.de)
The film interweaves three layers: the centre is Kleist's play "Penthesilea". Like from a distance Kleist observes the relationship beween man and woman, when he transfers into mythical Greece what in his time became a problem for him in Prussia - and remains to be a problem also for us. The director's associations during the work form the second layer. Reality and fantasy blend to an imaginary biography of Kleist, the third layer. At the end of the film Kleist is identical with his title character Penthesilesa. (www.filmgalerie451.de)
