Nur mit Dir zusammen (2020)

Juli Krahlich, a young singer, touches people with a song about her dead father. It looks as though the young woman’s dream of making it to the very top is coming true. A major tour is currently being planned. No one knows that her song is based on a lie. To Juli, her father Wim is dead because he once abandoned her and her mother, and she holds him partly responsible for her mother’s death. The truth, however, is that her father is very much alive—and a living rock legend. The news nephrologist Mateusz Tauber gives her after she collapses turns Juli’s life and plans completely upside down. The kidney disease she has carefully kept secret has worsened so drastically that Juli urgently needs a donor kidney. And since she has no one else, only her father can be a donor. Juli, who has had no contact with her father Wim for 17 years and does not really want any, is now forced to reach out to him again. At Juli’s request, Mateusz Tauber visits her father and returns with the news that Wim is willing to get tested, but makes spending time with him a condition. When Juli visits her father for the first time, he makes clear that he wants them to see each other regularly so they can get to know one another better. Seeing Juli’s less-than-enthusiastic expression, he qualifies this: at least until the transplant. Against her doctor’s advice, Juli wants to go ahead with her tour first and deal with the necessary kidney transplant afterward. She tries to make Tauber understand what her career means to her and that, even as a little girl, she dreamed of performing on big stages. Meanwhile, another meeting with her father ends with him saying that she need not come back, that she can have her kidney anyway, and that will be that. When Juli rings his doorbell again, he sends her away on a flimsy pretext. Shortly afterward, however, he picks her up to visit a place from their past. He tells her, “You know what the worst thing is? Mistakes you can never make right again.” When Juli learns that her father would face a high risk by donating a kidney, she cancels everything and leaves Mateusz Tauber with no choice in the matter. When Wim then wants to talk to his daughter, she admits that she intercepted his letters back then, believing she was sparing her mother further suffering. During an interview soon afterward, she unexpectedly admits that she lied: her father is not dead. She now also intends to give up the planned tour. Her father then agrees to a live interview (because it cannot be manipulated afterward and potentially distorted) and says moving words about his daughter. When they meet again, he tells her that he is now almost deaf. His greatest wish is to help her. Juli finally agrees to receive his kidney, and the transplant is successful. A month later, father and daughter make music together and plan to perform as a duo. Shortly afterward, when Juli goes to pick up her father for an appointment, he collapses and dies. Juli is devastated. Wim’s former bandmates urge Juli to give a concert just for her father; they say he would have liked that. Mateusz, with whom Juli has meanwhile formed a close bond, urges her to do so as well. And so the young woman decides to pay tribute to her father, inviting his former bandmates too. In tears, Juli sings the songs she and her father composed.