Directed by Valeska Grisebach (Germany)

Markus is a part time fireman in a dull country town. He has a wife he adores, a comfortable modest life of small pleasures - hanging out with the neighbours, doing handyman jobs, taking pride in his work as a metalworker. But his presence at the scene of a road accident where a woman dies but he saves the life of a man curiously unnnerves him and makes him aware of his own mortality and insignificance. Especially when he realises the crash was a suicide pact and he has by his well-meaning action maybe even done the wrong thing by the victim.

Everything begins to unravel slightly for him - the meaning (though not the intensity) of love, and his own stability, and when he goes off with his colleagues on a comradely weekend visit to another fire brigade his strange mood leads him into an almost inadvertent liaison with another woman. Back with his wife, whom he still loves, he has to make adjustments to the fact that it seems totally possible to love two people at the same time. The idyll of his simple life is broken. Pressure rises within him as he tries in his fumbling way to understand what is happening to him, and make some kind of decision about this uninvited rupture of normality. Another accident brings everything out into the open and leads to a half-expected act of violence.

Grisebach gets wonderful things out of her cast of non-professionals, particularly Andreas Muller, in life a car mechanic, who makes the passive figure of Markus, an almost constant screen presence, credible and sympathetic. There's a terrific long take of him dancing alone, completely absorbed, at the moment he is splitting off from the certainties of his old life. A remarkable aspect of the film is that it conveys much of this intensity of feeling - despair, tenderness, passion - in silence and inarticulacy. There are moments of great beauty in this tale of ordinary people, although the demanding slow pace proved too much for some members of the audience. Yet another of its strengths are the scenes of cheerful normality, nothing special, just the pleasant grain of everyday life in a small community. And the surprising coda, beautifully shot and mostly improvised, is a welcome change of focus.

Seen at Gala Cinema, Durham, 17 September 2007