Aus dem Schatten

'You can get it if you really want.' If this sentence applies to anyone, then it most definitely applies to Florian Burkhardt. He achieved nearly everything he wanted. Except the one thing that was most important to him: escaping himself.

Mario is a promising young footballer in Switzerland on his way to the top, closing in on the success he and his father always dreamed of. But when the talented striker Leon joins the team, they'll get caught up between the politics of the game and the politics of love, as rumours and prejudice threaten their careers and everything they've managed to build.

At the peak of his mid-life crisis, Swiss filmmaker Stefan Keller is forced to take on a side job out of financial necessity. Consequently, he finds himself travelling throughout Switzerland as an anonymous youth hostel tester just before Christmas. Thus begins his odyssey: Stefan is in desperate need of a story; he struggles with his failed relationship; and chance acquaintances force him to face the meaning of his existence.

Lorenz Meran, a successful gay author suffering acute writers' block, has to leave Berlin and return to eastern Switzerland to provide care for his aged mother, Rosie. But it is not only his mother's battle against being dictated to and losing her dignity that he is struggling with. It's also his own midlife crisis.

Noticing Marie's devastation after her boyfriend, Paul, dumps her, call boy Theo tries to help, and their friendship soon grows deeper, touching a part of Theo he's frozen in order to service his male clients. When Paul returns, however, his presence threatens this fragile new union.

15-year-old Beni falls in love with Fögi, a singer in a Rock band. As Fögi seduces him, he is only willing to follow him where ever Fögi wants to. But Fögi is a drug addict and pulls Beni deeper and deeper into the hell of drug addiction.

A trio takes shelter in a friend's apartment while he is away for awhile. One of the trio is Lola who teaches French on the side, maintains an out-of-sight hairstyle, and has a 10-year-old son. Another of the trio is a homosexual who supports himself by playing his flute on the street or reading to elderly women. The last friend in the group is Max, whose parents are sending him steady installments of cash to pay for non-existent studies; it seems Max is a writer waiting for inspiration to hit. In the meantime, he and Lola are an item.

Simon has a love-hate relationship with his father. When his parents go on holiday, Simon initiates a seductive game of cat-and-mouse with his father’s mistress and gets disastrously tangled up in the sticky family network.