Ayşe Polat grows up in Hafenstraße in Hamburg in the 1980s. The 15-year-old is surrounded by crime and is quickly pigeonholed by outsiders because of her living situation. However, the criminal environment doesn't say much about the person.
A train is heading for Germany - a train carrying migrant workers. Trains like this have come countless times since the late 1950s, from Italy, Yugoslavia, Greece, Turkey, Spain and Portugal, and they have brought with them, along with the people they carried, the dreams and hopes of these people for a better life and better work opportunities. In Germany, they were called guest workers.
The film tells the story of the everyday life of a large Italian family, the Villano family, who after returning five times to their homeland - a small village near Naples - have decided to stay in Germany forever.
15 years after his documentary film “Familie Villano kehrt nicht zurück”, Hans Andreas Guttner observes the second and third generation of this once ten-member Italian family.
Anyone who becomes old and therefore unprofitable apparently belongs in the bin. This ideology is taken at its word. An old man actually ends up on the garbage tip.
With almost 6000 employees, the Nuremberg Clinic is the largest municipal hospital in Europe. Using the urology clinic as an example, the film aims to make the infrastructure behind the medical care visible.
In Turkey, buses are a cheap, widespread and therefore the most important means of public transportation throughout the country. What the airplane is in America and the train is in Europe, the intercity bus is in Turkey. The documentary takes a trip through Turkey using the common people's means of transport.
