Synopsis
“He who is without sin among you, let him throw the first stone” - an Apostle of the New Apostolic Church lays a young married couple’s conflict to rest with this quotation from the Bible. Afterwards, nothing is ever said about the woman’s adultery. And so a young boy grows up in a deceptive idyll together with his family and his brothers and sisters in faith, firmly anchored in the ideologies of a petit-bourgeois, religious environment. He never really registers the fact that his appearance is unusual for a German. In his early twenties, he argues fiercely with his father, who reveals the supposed truth of his son’s origins in a rage.The family emerges as a structure of hypocrisy, its members as silent guardians of shared knowledge - not only that of his identity. Roaming his childhood haunts in Castrop-Rauxel, a small industrial town, and on subsequent travels to Lebanon he encounters strange familiars, and finally a familiar stranger.
original German/English/Arabic version with English subtitles available