The film portrays life on the Balduintreppe in Hamburg during the 1980s and early 1990s and thus takes us right into the heart of the time of the Hafenstrasse squat, which in many respects was a turning point. It circles the harbor steps, relives the squatters' battles with the police and visits the residents between utopia and the housing struggle.
Reiko, a female college student, was looking outside with her newly purchased telescope. She bought it impulsively, but since she had no intention of using it, she looked around the neighborhood.
Claude, a militant anarchist, is caught stealing and is shot by a policeman while fleeing the scene. Dodo, a hairdresser, is hit by one of the stray bullets.
A luxury home, a handsome husband and terrific children. But it all comes crashing down when she is accused of being a mastermind behind a brutal triple-homicide and is arrested and handcuffed in front of her own children.
A disgraced sports presenter falls victim to an accidental head trauma and slips into a coma. He awakens months later to find that South Africa was not as he left it, he is now in the New South Africa, and his multimillion-Rand idea has been stolen from beneath him.
Carmen, a journalist with two children, is on her third marriage, to Antonio, a record producer. Over the course of a year, we follow her through her discontents: Antonio's lateness, his fatigue when she wants to make love, his insistence on her company when she prefers solitude, his treating her work as less important than his, his casual and cruel dismissal of her opinions, her boss assigning her an incompetent editor, bartenders ignoring her, her passage into middle age.
