Berlin Alexanderplatz (2020)

Thirty-year-old Francis from Guinea-Bissau sets out with his lover Ida on the illegal crossing from West Africa to Europe. When their refugee boat gets caught in a storm on the Mediterranean at night and capsizes, he has to push Ida away and leave her to certain death by drowning in order to save himself. Francis wakes up as the sole survivor on a beach in Southern Europe. He swears to God that from then on he will be a decent person. Francis ends up in Berlin, where he finds shelter in a refugee center and joins other asylum seekers without papers or work permits on a construction site at Berlin’s Alexanderplatz. When a co-worker is seriously injured in a workplace accident and Francis moves him away from the site and lays him down for his own safety, Francis loses his job. His friend Ottu betrays him to the foreman so as not to jeopardize the continued employment of the other undocumented workers. Enraged, Francis attacks Ottu and seriously injures him. He flees the construction site, believing he has killed Ottu. Francis wanders lost through the city at night and gets drunk. After what he has done, Francis can no longer return to the refugee center. He turns to Reinhold, a German he knows from the center, who had tried to persuade its African residents to deal drugs in Hasenheide Volkspark. The neurotic Reinhold takes the kind-hearted, naive Francis into his apartment and tries to involve him in his illegal business. An intense but also compulsive and destructive friendship develops between the two men. Reinhold, who is sex-addicted and incapable of forming attachments, leaves with Francis the women he picks up and later wants to get rid of. Francis, for his part, refuses to sell drugs in the park. He does, however, agree to provide the men in the park with food. In doing so, he meets Reinhold’s boss, Pums, whom he impresses with tips on how to motivate the dealers more effectively. Francis, whom Reinhold has by now “christened” Franz, meets Eva, an Afro-German club owner, at a party one night. They fall in love. Francis no longer follows Reinhold unconditionally and dares to criticize him. After the two take part in a robbery of a jewelry store by the drug gang, Reinhold tries to kill Franz by throwing him out of the moving car as they flee. Franz wakes up in the hospital and is horrified to discover that he has lost his left forearm. He refuses to tell Eva the truth; she and her partner Berta are trying to take Reinhold out of circulation. They take Franz to Mieze’s apartment to recover. Mieze works under the name “Kitty” as a high-class prostitute. Despite their initial differences, Mieze and Franz fall in love. When he is at risk of bleeding to death, Mieze saves his life. Franz, in turn, joins Mieze in taking revenge on a client who had drugged her with knockout drops. He soon becomes her pimp and turns down Eva’s offer to move into an apartment near her. When Franz ambushes Reinhold in his apartment, he refrains from taking revenge on him. Reinhold confesses that he threw him out of the car out of jealousy over his relationship with Eva. Franz returns to Reinhold and is soon supposed to take over the drug business in Hasenheide, which he keeps secret from Mieze. At the same time, he tries to convince his lover to give up prostitution. Pums begins to favor Franz over Reinhold. When all three take part in a botched robbery, Reinhold kills Pums. As a witness, Franz then blackmails Reinhold. Franz wants to run the drug business with him on an equal footing and demands a German passport. Franz then successfully recruits new potential dealers at the refugee center where he used to live. Mieze announces that she is pregnant with Franz’s child. When Reinhold invites them to a big costume party at Eva’s club, Franz decides not to take Mieze in her condition. Out of spite, she meets a client, who turns out to be Reinhold. Wanting to find out more about Franz’s past and the accident, she lets herself get involved with Reinhold, and they spend several hours together in a hotel room. Back at the party, Reinhold appears as a big-game hunter, while he has chosen a gorilla costume for Franz and obtained the passport Franz wanted. Eva and Berta find Franz’s masquerade humiliating. Nevertheless, Eva grows close to Franz again. When Franz wants to introduce Mieze to Reinhold after the party, events spiral out of control. Mieze, unaware that Reinhold is in her apartment, senses that he must be responsible for the misfortune in Franz’s past. She wants to leave Berlin with Franz as soon as possible. She also calls Reinhold a psychopath. The situation escalates. Franz hits Mieze, and she throws both men out of the apartment. Franz moves back in with Reinhold, who sends prostitutes to him to cheer him up. But Franz cannot get over Mieze. He meets with her, but Mieze makes it clear that she cannot love both his good side and his bad side at the same time. Franz then wants to leave the drug business, but promises Reinhold that he will remain loyal to him. Reinhold, who is attracted to Mieze, meets with her to tell her the truth about Franz’s accident. Mieze, in turn, wants to buy Franz’s freedom. Reinhold takes the heavily pregnant woman on an outing to show her the refugee center where they had first met. Shaken by the conditions there, Mieze flees into the adjoining woods. In exchange for a kiss, Reinhold promises to tell her the truth about Franz’s accident. After his confession, Reinhold strangles Mieze, who is deeply shocked. Reinhold dismisses Franz from his service. Shortly afterward, Franz is arrested on suspicion of killing Mieze. In prison, overcome by grief and pain, he tries to poison himself. In his cell, he is haunted by visions of Reinhold and the people he met on his journey. At the same time, Reinhold, intoxicated, is enjoying himself in a club with two prostitutes. In his feverish delirium, the two men seem connected by an invisible bond. Reinhold confesses to Mieze’s murder and tries to kill one of the women. The other prostitute knocks him down, and he is later arrested by the police. Franz has decided to start over once more. After four years, he is released from prison as Francis. Eva picks him up from the prison, accompanied by Francis’s daughter, who survived Reinhold’s attempted murder while she was still in Mieze’s womb. In the final shot, Francis is seen at the Neptune Fountain near Berlin’s Alexanderplatz.