The opening film of the Directors’ Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival in 1999, Paths in the Night is a dramatic work shot in haunting black and white. Set against the backdrop of post-unification Germany, the film explores the breakdown of relations in a decaying social structure. Unemployed and alienated from his waitress-wife, fifty-five-year-old Walter (Thate), an ex-factory manager from the communist East, has lost both his prestige and his ideals and is overwhelmed by the bleakness of his current existence. Unable to integrate into the new system, he revisits the ruins of his old factory by night. In an attempt to regain a sense of purpose and restore order to the world around him, he recruits a pair of simple-minded youths to ride Berlin’s underground by night as crime-fighting vigilantes.