Ari and Oona go to the same school. Lolita-like Ari, is blonde, pouting and lives in a world of bright colours, frustrated by her mother still treating her as a child, while arty Oona dresses in black and is treated as an adult by her artist father. When Oona’s father commits suicide after his wife has an affair with his brother Lukas, Oona starts to self-harm, but finds and unlikely friendship with Ari. Ari’s enthusiasm for exerting her sexuality rebounds when she starts an affair with Oona’s uncle, who has recently moved in with Oona’s mother.

Between forests and hills, the river Ahr meanders through a mystical, foggy autumn landscape. Amidst this idyll a man awakens in the middle of a vineyard. He does not know who he is, where he is or how he came to be here. Next to him is a dead young woman lying among the vines. As a foreigner in the secluded town in the Ahr valley he enters an archaic village community, which seems to keep a secret from him.

The story of Michael Berg, a German lawyer who, as a teenager in the late 1950s, had an affair with an older woman, Hanna, who then disappeared only to resurface years later as one of the defendants in a war crimes trial stemming from her actions as a concentration camp guard late in the war. He alone realizes that Hanna is illiterate and may be concealing that fact at the expense of her freedom.