Wanted for theft, Rita flees to Belgium with her baby. She manages to find her real father there, whom she never met, but he has a new wife and children and cannot take her in. The Belgian police arrest her and deport her to Germany, where she is sentenced to a long prison term. Rita’s other four children live with her mother Isabella during this time, but she is too busy working, and the oldest daughter Fanny has to take on the responsibility for them. When Rita is released from prison, she takes back her children. With the aid of Marc, a US soldier stationed in Germany, she develops something like normal family life. But when Marc is to be transferred back to America, Rita’s entire life is thrown off balance. —Berlinale Film Festival
Maria Speth, born in Titting/Bavaria on 19.8.1967. After taking acting lessons she worked, as of 1990, as an editor’s and director’s assistant on cinema and TV films. 1996-2002 she studied at the “Konrad Wolf” Academy of Film and Television in Potsdam-Babelsberg. After making short films, she graduated with her prize-winning debut “In den Tag heinein” (“The Days Between”, 2001). Maria Speth writes and directs all her films. She developed the look of her feature films together with DoP Reinhold Vorschneider. —Berlinale
"Everybody seems to know what a good mother should and shouldn’t do. And if she fails, massive moral sanctions are the consequence, unlike fathers in the same positions. But social reality is full of mothers who fail to fulfill their role the way society expects them to." —Maria Speth
