Siegfried W. Kernen

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.

What does being a Jew mean nowadays? Emanuel Goldfarb, a Jewish journalist, is asked by the Director of a Jewish community in Germany, to respond to an invitation by a professor to tell his pupils about his life as a Jew living in Germany. This conversation, performed by Goldfarb and the Director of the community, is the only scene of Oliver Hirschbiegel's film « Ein ganz gewohnlicher Jude » presented at the Film and Television Festival of Genève, which was shot outdoors and it's the only moment where something apparently happens.

After the death of their parents, the sisters Astrid and Britta want to make the Winkelmann fashion house number one in their hometown. Astrid accepts that her already troubled marriage to Bernd suffers from the ambitious goal - until Bernd agrees to have a relationship with Britta. When she gets pregnant, there is a scandal between the sisters.

German vehicle fanatic Dieter 'Didi' accepts to drive a truckload of waste barrels to a French dump site. Didi ignores the plant needs to dump toxic waste after a major incident, which made the international news. But while the French site exploiter's agent Marcel believes it's Did's load, that's in fact a deliberately obvious diversion. Now everyone chases everyone else.

The norms of hospital practices are turned upside-down in this complex drama about how many rights are denied patients who do not conform. At the beginning of the story, a man is found lying on the side of the road and is brought in to the police station as a probable vagrant, but he has no memory and seems to have lost his powers of speech. Perplexed and defeated by their unsuccessful attempts to make him talk, the police send the man over to the hospital for examination by psychiatrists. After some time, it becomes apparent that he understands everything going on around him and is simply refusing to talk. This sets off a series of antagonistic actions on the part of the hospital staff, suspicious about his "purpose" in remaining silent. Although some explanation is discovered as to why he is this way, the supposedly sane doctors and staff come off looking like they may need treatment themselves.

Herbie Melbourne is a poor schlemiel who is inadvertently caught between the Devil and the deep blue sea in this German farce about a cab driver assigned to bring a "comrade" back to the East German side of the Berlin wall, a passenger who is dead to the world, permanently, when he arrives. Herbie the cabbie is recruited by the KGB and East German Intelligence to help them discover who murdered the man in his back seat. After arriving on the West German side of the divide, Herbie is then recruited by the CIA and West German Intelligence to become a counterspy, for double what the other side is paying him. As Herbie seems to have no viable way out of this mess, he goes to a therapist for help. Reaching into her bag of tricks, she gives Herbie a small bottle he can sniff when in need of self-confidence, an act guaranteed to put him on top of any situation. Now Herbie is a cabbie, a KGB agent, a CIA agent, and a bottle sniffer -- and he is falling in love with his gorgeous therapist.