Matthee reworks a sequence from Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind (1956) in which a woman dances to the rhythm of jazz and provokes the death of the father.
Maria since childhood was directed by her father to become a nun. As a result of her father's cultivation of a rigid appreciation, Maria always feels awkward, including the delinquency that is common for a girl.
Writes Viola: "Sodium Vapor was recorded over a period of several weeks in the hours between one and five in the morning on the streets of an industrial area in lower Manhattan.
Something very common in our days, an adolescent who does not find communication with her mother or stepfather falls into a depression that drags her down paths of difficult return.
This film deals with the contrasts of the Wilhelminian era in Berlin: the splendor of the monarchy, the economic and intellectual vitality of the up-and-coming imperial capital on the one hand, and the misery of the proletarians in the tenements on the other.