A director, a scriptwriter, and an actor discuss the making of a movie in Germany immediately after World War II. By chance they hit upon the story of a couple, narrated in flashbacks and from different perspectives. In this film about filmmaking, screenwriter Helmut Käutner and director Rudolf Jugert cannily break all the rules, offering a variety of genres—from romantic melodrama to war film to comedy to pseudo-documentary. Like the cinema of the time, life in this film seems to oscillate between gloomy reminiscences of the war years and bright hopes for normal life. One of the first postwar productions, and at the time enthusiastically received, the film features a very young Hildegard Knef in her second appearance on screen.