Yesterday My Friend Bought a Bike

It is a Saturday in autumn, and Karin and Simon are visiting their parents and youngest sister Clara. This family gathering provides the occasion for a dinner together, at which other relatives appear over the course of the day. While the family members animate the apartment’s space with their conversations, everyday activities and cooking preparations, the cat and dog range through the various rooms. they too become a central element in this quotidian familial dance that repeatedly manifests stylized elements, disrupting any naturalistic mode of presentation. In this way, adjoining spaces open up between family drama, fairy tale and the psychological study of a mother.

Karen and Markus live with their children in Karen’s parents’ house. Karen’s sister Jule travels with her family to Markus’ birthday party. While Karen takes everyone’s breath away with her domineering manner, Jule is the complete opposite. Gradually a front forms against Karen until everything escalates into a fiery inferno. An inferno that destroys the old to create the new.

Lisa is moving. Upheaval all around: Her mother flirts with a handyman. An eccentric woman seems to be preparing for a glamorous event, a family next door returns from vacation, and a girl documents the adventurous day. As boxes are transported, walls painted white, and furniture is assembled, underlying problems in need of fixing are revealed, a to-do list expands, and desires and needs flair up.

Nadine and Janine share a flat together with their friends Mark and Andreas. The flat share is a universe with its own rules, languages, manners and relationships. A stimulating place, where chaos is floating through corridors and rooms. Pending over everything is the approaching breakup of the community, which becomes more and more perceptible within short moments of silence. One of the flat mates, Janine, is going to leave. Janine's farewell party affects each other of her friends in an different way. A precise description of a fragile structure breaking apart.

A nighttime odyssey just before New Year's Eve: a woman and a man walking along a back road, caught up in a fight. Their conflict spreads out around them: it covers the dirty coat the woman is wearing, a child she meets and a waiter who doesn't want to leave her alone. Between external stimuli and internal conditions an idiosyncratic and seemingly inescapable space of repressed aggression and confrontation emerges.

Alexandra is spending the weekend at her parents' house. As she arrives at the familiar apartment, nobody's home. Yet successively, the mother, a friend of the family and the father get in. The rooms, which were quite in the beginning, slowly fill up with noises, conversations and activity. Alexandra withdraws from the social world of the family structure repeatedly. Finally, the mother, the father and the friend go to the movies together. Alexandra is left behind by herself.