So weit kommt's noch (2024)

Bärbel and Lutz Schmitz have been together for 25 years and lead a settled life near Cologne with their children, Ben, Leonie, and Jonas. Bärbel’s mother, Lis Polke, lives in a retirement home and visits occasionally, for example to ask Jonas for help with problems with her smartphone. Bärbel works part-time at the front desk of the freight company Rheinland Logistics. For her husband’s birthday, Bärbel buys him a shirt. Inside it, she finds a small note asking for help. It reads: “Please I need your help. My family is poor and we have no money for food and medicine. Our fate is in your hand”. The sender is identified as Rani Manabendra Chandra from Dhaka, Bangladesh. Bärbel does not discuss it with her husband, who has been busy for months building a model of the Cutty Sark. Her daughter Leonie advises her simply to make a donation. Bärbel contacts the aid organization Fair & Free, where Jamilah and Noah work. She wants to find out whether Rani really exists and how she could help him. At first, however, Jamilah and Noah are not much help. At his birthday party, a tipsy Lutz sings sea shanties while their daughter Leonie posts recordings of him online. Bärbel asks her two adult children, Leonie and Jonas, to sort through everything they no longer need, such as toys, so they can sell it and raise money for donations. Their neighbor Georg Räderscheidt is an admirer of Lis. Leonie hits him while backing the car out, and he is taken to hospital, where he is diagnosed with a mild concussion. Bärbel wonders how one can decide whom to help when so many people need help. Her mother Lis replies: “Whoever saves one person saves the whole world.” Bärbel contacts Rani and sends him around 100 euros, which is about a month’s wages in Bangladesh. However, she gives the NGO Fair & Free’s address as the return address, in case he turns out to be a fraudster. Bärbel and Rani begin corresponding, which she keeps secret from her husband and discusses only with Noah from the NGO. Bärbel’s cousin Lotte catches her and Noah embracing and suspects they are having an affair. Bärbel withdraws a large sum of money from the account for Lutz’s sailboat. Jonas admits that he lost his grandfather’s inheritance through a bad investment. Leonie had also put her inheritance into Jonas’s investment and lost it, along with Grandma Lis’s inheritance—a total of around 60,000 euros. After Lutz discovers that money is missing from the sailboat account, Bärbel admits that she needed it for Rani. She had thought Lutz would never make his dream of owning a sailboat come true anyway. This leads to an argument between Lutz and Bärbel because she donated his money without asking. Lutz moves out of the house Bärbel had inherited. A friend of Bärbel’s discovers that the poems Rani sent her were not written by him, but by the poet Shayan Jamal Mathila. It is possible that everything else Rani told her was a lie, too. During a video call, Bärbel learns that Rani is said to have been abducted at some point because of his homosexuality. Bärbel eventually takes Bijaya and her sick son Keshab into her home. Rani had presented the two as his wife and son and fled with them to Dhaka after their father was killed in an attack by radical Bengali Muslims on members of the Chakma people. A few months later, Bärbel and Lutz reconcile.