Auf das Leben! (2014)

Former cabaret singer Ruth Weintraub is evicted from her home and her string-instrument repair workshop in her old age and relocated to an anonymous housing complex. The young removal man Jonas is the only one to show her a little empathy; after her old apartment has been cleared out, he drives the elderly woman to her new accommodation. She asks him to deliver a repaired instrument to a customer. When he returns later to bring her the customer’s money, he finds her unconscious in the bathroom, with her wrists cut. He drives her to the hospital and brings her a few personal belongings the next day. He has no place to live in Berlin and usually sleeps in his van. But after it is stolen, and with Ruth now confined to a psychiatric hospital, he makes a camp in her new apartment. A bond develops between the two characters, who seem very different on the surface, as their life stories gradually come to light: As a child, Ruth narrowly escaped being murdered in a concentration camp, unlike the rest of her Jewish family. Her singing career came to an abrupt end in the 1970s after she unexpectedly encountered Knoch, her tormentor from the Nazi era, at an art exhibition opening, stabbed him with a knife, and had to go to prison. After her release, she never sang again and has since repaired string instruments in her small workshop. Jonas is fleeing from everyone he loves because he has multiple sclerosis and wants to spare them his suffering.