Kilian Schüler

Cologne/Bonn Airport: Detective Inspector Mark Kleinert transfers the young Turkish man Baran Sahin, who has been arrested for illegal possession of weapons, to Istanbul. Seemingly a routine operation - until Kleinert receives a call from his lover Carla Paditz, urging him to meet her in Istanbul. When Kleinert arrives at the hotel, Carla is already dead. Mark Kleinert does not realize that Jo Weiß, an undercover BKA officer, is also at the hotel at the same time and is watching him. The fact that there is an even bigger crime behind the murder of the woman on the Bosporus becomes clear after the murder of the imprisoned Baran Sahin. And when Mark Kleinert wants to know why he of all people was responsible for his transfer, his life is already in danger - and not only his.

Lukas Maler is a butcher. Albeit more out of necessity than out of passion: As the “Karajan with the scalpel”, his vocation was always forensic medicine. When he accidently destroyed all evidence against the “24-hour-killer”, his career as a coroner was done for. And not far from it was his marriage with his great love Diana, whom he could not offer anything anymore as a broken man. But Lukas gets a second chance when once again a serial killer terrifies the city because the murders resemble those of the “24-hour-killer”. Diana – who has ascended to head of the forensic institute in the meantime – knows that only the best one can solve the case. But he is not available. And so, she gets the second-best one: the most over-qualified butcher in town…

Drama, based on the book "Retter in der Nacht", in which Marga Spiegel tells her memories: In Westfalia of 1943 Marga Spiegel, her husband and her daughter are about to be deported. Yet westfalian farmers help the jewish family, grant Marga and her daughter refuge under false names and hide her husband.

The film starts with the main character Laura, a young woman with advanced cancer, entering quite upset the home of her parents and claiming to have stopped chemo therapy and having left her husband. The worried parents call the other three adult daughters into the house and they arrive one by one. For the first time in 6 years the entire family is united again. The characters are drawn as tensions rise from old conflicts and as the situation sinks in that Laura might be terminally ill. The movie eventually shifts from a lively sometimes comical beginning into the serious theme of dying and does handle this quite tactfully and moving. While the film touches on many areas surrounding death (including religion, graveyard, care, eutanasia) the main focus is on the transformation of the characters that are thrown out of their busy lifes into this situation, eventually accepting it and dealing with it.