Running on Empty (German: Der Lebensversicherer) is a 2006 German drama film directed by Bülent Akinci. It was entered into the 28th Moscow International Film Festival where Jens Harzer won the award for Best Actor.
After his stubborn father suffers a stroke, a sensitive son (Michael) becomes his temporary caretaker, and the tensions of their estranged relationship come to the surface.
In a loveless relationship, Zoé ditches her faceless boyfriend in a cheap motel room and sets off north without a penny to her name. She hitch-hikes, pilfers a meal from a gas station, encounters strangers who could be her next ride or a passing glimpse, ambling toward some unknown destination. At the end of her pilgrimage, Zoé reaches the English Channel; on the ferry a woman mysteriously disappears. A new coat gives Zoé a new identity, but even in a new country she's not quite sure she's escaped herself.
Meine beste Feindin
A slightly sinister but charming young man falls in with a young mother and daughter and her boyfriend on a camping holiday and leads them astray.
Summer is the time to travel, enjoy life, and do or leave what you want. A motor home with two occupants makes its way south. But the two travelers do not travel voluntarily, and certainly not together.
A super-model begins to question her glitzy, frenetic lifestyle when she awakes after a all night party to find a strange man in her bed. She sees a surfer riding the waves below, follows him to his tented camp on the banks of a river. 'Leatherlip' earns a living making leather goods and roaming around on an extraordinary 'trike' with his worldly goods and surfboard strapped on an overhead rack. They fall in love and she abandons her previous life. Then inexplicably she disappears. Leatherlip sets off on a cross-country odyssey to find her, knowing only that her father lives on a boat on the West Coast...
It all starts with a bang. The car breaks through the crash barrier and falls off the bridge. The lights go out. After that, he is not able to see anymore. His optic nerve is severed, from now on the young stage-director Jakob is blind. His life will change and nothing will ever be the same. Jakob cannot handle the idea of never being able to see again and screams at the only woman who is able and willing to help him, Lily. A rehabilitation teacher, she helps the blind deal with the darkness. Lily has been living with it since birth, she too is blind.
German journalist Philip Winter has a case of writer’s block when trying to write an article about the United States. He decides to return to Germany, and while trying to book a flight, encounters a German woman and her nine year old daughter Alice doing the same. The three become friends (almost out of necessity) and while the mother asks Winter to mind Alice temporarily, it quickly becomes apparent that Alice will be his responsibility for longer than he expected.
Based on the journals of Che Guevara, leader of the Cuban Revolution. In his memoirs, Guevara recounts adventures he and best friend Alberto Granado had while crossing South America by motorcycle in the early 1950s.
The Hamburg friends Walter, Ricco and Floyd take each day as it comes between the estates of tower blocks and fast food restaurants. All three are in their early twenties and are dreaming of another life when Floyd suddenly takes a job on a freighter going to Singapore.
A Russian poet, Andrei and his interpreter, Eugenia travel to Italy to research the life of an 18th-century composer.
A tectonic shift deep below the Mariana Trench causes a series of ever escalating earthquakes. If a team of leading seismologists fails to stop the disaster, the events will break apart the Earth, resulting in billions of casualties. Finally, someone’s paying attention to our leading seismologists.
A boy and his brother run away from home and hitch cross-country, with help from a girl they meet, to compete in the ultimate video-game championship.
In a countryside house in the Ecuadorean Andes Mountains lives Christine, a paralytic old woman who has decided to be isolated from the world. In that place, she found refuge in old memories of her first love, Manuel. Years after getting married and widowed from another man, Christine and her daughter, Julia, decide to put together a plan in order to reunite two young people at their countryside house. Christine's drive is for them to fall in love, so she can relive love through their eyes.
Victoria returns to Nigeria from the UK to help estranged husband Izu cope with his uncle's death. Hoping to save his marriage, Izu brings Victoria on his trip to the funeral, during which they reflect on their courtship, secrets and regrets.
Jeud is a young man deceived by love. With all the money he has left, he buys a car in order to go on a road trip. By chance, he picks up two people who go along with him. Nud, a Southern-Thai girl who was trafficked into prostitution, but managed to escape. Roeng, a man with a history and who is on his way to reclaim his past.The further the three travel together, the more their true selves starts to be revealed. All of them begin to find hope in the future when they manage to discard the disappointments in their past.
Pan Xiao, a young lawyer, goes to a rural small village settled in the western desert lands of China to handle the case of a falcon poacher who has ran over a policeman. Pan wins the case through sophisticated reasoning and forces the poacher to give him his car as a reward. Then, he just drives back home, but the return will not be an easy one.
Branko has been a truck driver for only a few months, a choice that is quite understandable, given that he now earns three times as much as he did as a schoolteacher. But everything has a price, which is not always quantifiable in terms of money. As children we were told: “work ennobles man”. But here the opposite seems true: it is Branko, with his efficiency, his obstinacy, his good will, who ennobles a job that grows more and more alienating, absurd and enslaving.
An emotional journey of a former school teacher, who writes letters for illiterate people, and a young boy, whose mother has just died, as they search for the father he never knew.