Die Kleinen und die Bösen (2015)

Benno, a probation officer who once entered social work with high ideals, has by now settled comfortably and pragmatically into the dreariness of his life. He has been supervising his client Hotte for what feels like forever and has given up all illusions about him. Hotte is not only a habitual drinker but also a habitual criminal. Unexpectedly, he is awarded custody of his two children, Dennis and Jenny. Benno therefore feels compelled to persuade the youth welfare office that the two teenagers would be better off in a supervised residential group. But his half-hearted approach gets him nowhere, so Hotte moves in with his children in the comfortable apartment of their grandmother, who has just died. Shortly afterward, when Dennis is killed in an accident, Benno suspects that Hotte was trying to “train” his son during a burglary. Hotte vehemently denies it. The incident changes Benno’s life. He blames himself in part for Dennis’s death and from then on starts standing up for others. He is determined to get Jenny out from under Hotte’s influence, but the youth welfare office sticks to its decision. Benno sees only one way to save the girl from her father: he sets a trap for Hotte to get him sent back to prison. But Benno’s plan goes wrong, setting things in motion that he can no longer control. When he temporarily takes Jenny in at his home, his girlfriend Tanja reacts with pronounced displeasure—she had imagined their family growing in a different, more traditional way: through a child of their own. Since Benno had never told her he was infertile, the two of them now have a fight. Jenny soon brings problems of her own: she falls in love with Ivic, a young Kosovar criminal who is also one of Benno’s clients. In the midst of this chaos, Benno finds comfort in Anabell, the Portuguese striptease dancer from his regular bar, whose optimism does him good. Hotte sees through Benno’s plan and takes up the fight for his daughter. What even he had hardly expected is that he slowly begins to feel something like fatherly affection. Together with Ivic, he plans a big heist so that afterward he can take Jenny and the stolen money and disappear to Mallorca. When Benno gets the chance to take Hotte’s loot for himself, he has to make the hardest decision of his life. But by now the disillusioned, cynical civil servant has become a new Benno, someone who believes in something again, and this leads him to a very unexpected decision: in the end, he finds himself running a beach restaurant in the Azores. His dream of a family has even come true, in a way: he is surrounded by a patchwork family of more or less hopeless cases. Anabell and her disabled daughter Inez are there, along with Jenny and even the crazy Ivic. And Hotte, too. Benno’s social work goes on.