"For more than a year me and my little team worked on shooting documentary material of people and places in the city of Berlin and its outskirts. For these shoots I took the freedom to try to forget what I was looking for in these places and just waited. The places I chose for shooting led me to the people. Short but surprising observations of people and their behavior in their particular environment were thus created. I combined these collected fragments of stories with each other, and the new combinations formed incomplete stories, which, being very open, are able to break through and enter the world of the spectator. While shooting documentary footage of events in Berlin, state visits for example, demonstrations and other happenings, I focussed especially on the little details of what was going on, the trivial situations at the side that reveal something about the structures, the staging and the purposes of such events. The more encompassing gaze of the camera makes them appear in a different light. During the montage of the filmed material we were looking for narrating possibilities that are not part of the average essay and classic documentary filming tradition. This process of trying and testing out took a lot of time, as well as the sound design, which was created for the film by Tim Elzer and also evolved through different working stages. As a result of this intense work on the image, montage and sound the film acquired its very own point of view which shows a touching, surprising and irritating image of present Berlin: the known reality appears unfamiliar as if from a different world." Volker Sattel