The time of great festivities, of noble health-resort idyll are long gone. A place torn by modern functional buildings and decaying, once fashionable hotel palaces. In this scenery, Lenz, a masseur, is struggling for his survival, barely keeping a day-to-day routine. He has become estranged from his wife and child. When he meets the dancer Nurit his life is thrown completely out of balance.
Black snow and a grey sky. A young bank robber takes a man as hostage who has been prevented from committing suicide; he is also encumered by a charming, self-willed woman witness . . . But no matter how he tries to extract himself, the three of them are stuck with each other.
The main themes of this film are WAR - FLIGHT - FAMINE - DISEASE from the viewpoint of children. Refugees from Afghanistan, Palestine, Nicaragua and Cambodia. Military training of Persian and Cambodian (refugee) children in camps. The soundtrack accompanying these frames consists of poems which prisoners scratched on the walls of their cells before they were executed.
In this well-photographed and sometimes confusing wartime drama, an Austrian village experiences the tragedy of war on several different levels. Within one family, the younger son is jealous of the praise his father gives to a Polish POW who is working for them under very difficult conditions. Within the village as a whole, the French, Polish, and Russian POWs are kept under guard by Nazi soldiers, creating a tense situation all around. But more importantly, the village has conspired to hide an Austrian deserter in a cave up in the mountains. This act of rebellion on the part of the deserter and the village hangs in a precarious balance that could be upset by a single traitorous comment to the Gestapo.
An unknown disease has annihilated the human race. Sand - just a tiny heap of white sand is all that is left of a human being. When Ruth and Sylvester meet, they are the only survivors. They are immune against the deadly disease; on the brink of madness, they find themselves incapable of shifting the burden of responsibility for mankind, which fate has placed upon them. Could they do anything but start from scratch?
Two young Europeans - Eva, a journalist, and her cousin, Mike, a filmmaker, want to make a film about the secret cult of the Makonde in Mozambique: "Magic Africa". On the hunt after the secret cult, Eva becomes aware of the heritage of colonialism: unemployment and civil war. Mike has only one thing in mind - to sell their travel film.
