Berlin. An ever changing metropolis, where many people of various nationalities search – for themselves, each other, a place to belong, a person to belong to.
Three relationships. One starting, one ending, one going nowhere. Three relationships connected by circumstance, where paths cross and lives interweave, one encounter influencing the next as the carousel of love keeps turning - triggering events that will alter the course of their lives.
The Berliners Max and Leo are father and son. Max was never there for Leo when he was growing up. Since his mother Edda passed away Leo lives alone, running her old bar. Max, overcome with guilt, has returned to try and make amends. Both to Leo and his deceased wife Edda. Only it is too late. He has avoided responsibility his whole life, moving from pillar to post. Leo grew up alone and now needs no-one. Least of all a father he neither likes or wants sleeping on his sofa. Both are coming to terms with the loss of Edda.
While Leo invests all his time and energy in the bar he inherited from his mother, Max searches for a new start in the city where he was born and now feels like a stranger. He embarks on a series of one-night stands via internet dating. But he is haunted by the ghost of Edda, his guilty conscience, his only love.
David and Jane are an English couple living in Berlin. He works as a therapist, she as a gallerist. They have long since ceased communicating with each other, keeping long hours to avoid too much time at home. Trapped in a relationship yet so very alone. They move between gallery, therapy practice and rooftop apartment. Cold environments without colour, uncluttered spaces for a relationship that has long since died.
Jane compensates for her loneliness by pursuing a series of internet dates where she invents and reinvents herself in the anonymous environment without ever consummating an evening. David has long since betrayed Jane. First with thoughts he sternly rebuked. Then he succumbed to passion and emotion with the one person who shares and understands his loneliness. His young patient Mi-Nah, employed by Jane in her gallery.
Mi-Nah has fled the constraints of her Korean homeland and lives in Berlin, working for Jane in her gallery to earn her keep. After a while here her feelings of freedom and euphoria were replaced by feelings of loneliness and depression. The rejection of the culture and country that repressed her back now leaves her with a feeling of emptiness and loss. On the advice of Jane she seeks help from David in an attempt to find a sense of contentment with herself while living far away from home.
What they all have in common is that they all are alone. They yearn for love and intimacy yet struggle with loneliness and anonymity in a city of millions.
Like a mosaic, the thoughts and dilemmas of David's therapy patients offer brief glimpses into the lonely souls of the city. Wanda, Polish, and all alone feels desperate. Adam, American, torn between his wife his lover and his conscience. Charlotte, French, always wants what she cannot have. Raisa and Karl, Portuguese & German, who don't even know if they want to be together. They bookend the chapters of the story, underscoring and reflecting the main protagonists and their conflicts.
The catalyst of the story is the chance meeting and subsequent romance between Mi-Nah and Leo. Falling in love propells them in a new direction in life causing waves that affect the other protagonists. Inevitably the lies, betrayals and secrets can carry on no longer and at once all motives, actions and feelings are exposed in Leo's bar with everyone present.
The protagonists are confronted with the truths and their loneliness and the story moves towards it's end as they struggle, overcome and interact again to move on in life. We end with a finale high above the rooftops of Berlin where David confronts his new found freedom.