Daniel Werner

East Germany. Summer, late 70's. Three years after her boyfriend Wassilij's apparent death, Nelly Senff decides to escape from behind the Berlin wall with her son Alexej, leaving her traumatic memories and past behind. Pretending to marry a West German, she crosses the border to start a new life in the West. But soon her past starts to haunt her as the Allied Secret Service begin to question Wassilij's mysterious disappearance. Is he still alive? Was he a spy? Plagued by her past and fraught with paranoia, Nelly is forced to choose between discovering the truth about her former lover and her hopes for a better tomorrow.

The Bachmann family's life is falling apart at the seams. Little Florian needs his dad - Peter Bachmann. Peter, his wife Maria and daughter Sophie have been unaware of his existence until now. A test begins. Can Maria forgive her husband for his infidelity? Should they really take the strange child into their family? When they finally decide in favor of Florian, they learn that he is no ordinary child. He is a boy with Down's syndrome. They are shocked. Once again their love is put to the test. Will she be big enough to accept Florian?

In 1916, the name of the French fortress town of Verdun came to symbolize the greatest battle of attrition of all time - a portent of mass death on the battlefields of the 20th century. Based on selected individual fates, the film "The Hell of Verdun" tells the story of a military inferno in which people were regarded as material, not as individuals. More than 700,000 soldiers, German and French, died, were wounded or remained missing, without the course of the front changing significantly.