Life Is All You Get

Jan works at a slaughterhouse in Berlin. In short order he loses everything: he is sacked, his father dies, his girlfriend leaves. On top of that a misunderstanding puts the suspicion of an illness into his life. In that state he meets Vera, a street musician who is like nobody else. Something starts between them and neither is in a condition to carry it. The film takes place in the Berlin of the nineties, a city still under construction. Wolfgang Becker directs the German film; a hundred and fifteen minutes, with Jürgen Vogel as Jan and Christiane Paul as Vera. A few years later Becker would make Good Bye Lenin. The title is a German expression: life is a building site.