Ruth Reinecke

Convinced that his daughter has forgotten how to laugh, a father shows up unannounced while she's living abroad and bombards her with outrageous jokes.

Boris and Jonathan have been a couple for many years. But their relationship has reached a point where they might as well spend their evenings together separately: One lies in bed reading, the other works at a desk in the next room. While actor Boris digs deeper into rehearsals for a new film with an ambitious director and begins to mix real and fictional characters, Jonathan tries to redefine his voice as a writer. Ghosting through these days of wrestling with distance, closeness, trust, desire and fear of loss is Jonathans' young niece Josie, who is trying to deal with the approaching end of her childhood in her own idiosyncratic way. BONES AND NAMES, the feature debut of Fabian Stumm, portrays people searching for their place in life in different ways. A sensitive and humorous reflection on the dissonances in relationships that both connect and distance us from each other.

Max Krenke, once a promising journalist, has made himself comfortable at a third-rate newspaper; as a husband and family man, he keeps the hamster wheel of everyday life running. Until he is laid off without notice on his 45th birthday of all days.

Four very retired, ex-GDR spies, or "Kundschafter des Friedens" as they were officially named, led by the once legendary Jochen Falk, are called on by the German government. Their mission is to rescue the interim president of the divided Republic of Katschekistan, who has been kidnapped by separatists, along with Berlin's official man on the ground, Franz Kern. To keep Jochen and his maybe no longer so crack team under control, all of whom are determined to prove they were treated unfairly by history, they are put under the command of the young and enthusiastic BND agent Paula Kern.

Matthias is hopelessly overwhelmed when suddenly his mother Gisela is at the door. After a thigh fracture she sits in a wheelchair and needs help. When Matthias learns that Gisela has discharged herself from the rehab clinic, he realizes that she needs new life courage and is desperately looking for a solution. It comes quite unexpectedly from Tom, Gisela's ten-year-old grandson: Grandma needs a worshiper! The unusual plan works. The anonymous love letters, written by Matthias himself, enchant his mother. But when she wants to meet the unknown, all the dizziness threatens to fly up.

The engineer Rosalie leads a life without standing still. She doesn't feel old for a long time, only mature. When Rosalie returns to Germany after a fainting spell at a solar project in Africa, it's just supposed to be a breather. When she shows up at her bourgeois sister Margret's with a huge container, she is not very enthusiastic about the surprise visit. The retired teacher sees right through that Rosalie isn't staying with her voluntarily. The well-travelled woman is broke! It seems like a miracle that there are a huge chunk of banknotes in a hole in the wall of the room. On the other side of the wall there is the room of the highly talented high school graduate Karla, who rents a part of Margret's house with her father Harald. After a failed first meeting, Rosalie befriends with the wheelchair-bound teenager and sets her mind on getting Karla out of her sheltered isolation, even against her will.