BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ

Burhan Qurbani and his co-writer Martin Behnke draw on elements and characters from Alfred Döblin’s classic 1929 novel for their story set in present-day Berlin of a refugee from Guinea Bissau, Francis, who arrives in the German capital after illegally crossing by boat from Africa to Europe. He honestly strives to be a good and decent man, but making a legal living as a stateless refugee turns out to be practically impossible. Soon, Francis meets the shady German drug dealer Reinhold, and the two men are bound together by a cynical fate and destructive magnetism, friendship and betrayal, hatred and a dark eroticism, as well as by love and the abuse of this love.