The border between Germany and Poland, formed by the river Oder, provides an intriguing setting for this exploration of the boundaries of national and personal identities. Schmid interweaves five narrative threads: a group of Ukrainian refugees beg and bargain for entry to the “golden West”; a businessman loses everything he owns only to find something of much greater value; a young cigarette smuggler defies his father and brother to free the girl he loves from a detention center; an interpreter risks her career and her freedom to help an illegal refugee; and an architect meets his former girlfriend and discovers that they have both changed too much to find common ground. With deep humanist empathy, Schmid provides a sensitive yet realist portrait of characters searching for individual freedom in an often hostile world.