This beautiful film tells the quiet and unsentimental story of loneliness and emptiness in old age, and of a tender—though tragic—love. It is based on a short story by the American author and Nobel prize winner Isaac Bashevis Singer, whose stories often take place in the Jewish world of New York or Florida, and tell of love, adventure and catastrophes. Singer writes, "the love of old or mid-aged people, is a topic which takes more and more space in my work. In literature old people and their feelings have been neglected. The novel writers have never told us, that in love, as well in other areas, the young ones are only beginners and that the art of loving matures with age and experience."

A young Pakistani man seeking to gain residence in Hamburg takes an illegal job in a Chinese restaurant. He befriends a young waiter who decides to join him in pursuing their dream of opening a restaurant of their own. Director Schütte provides a humanist perspective on cultural displacement in modern Germany and the struggles of the new immigrant class.