A comedy about aging, youth and other eternal truths. Of all days, precisely on her fiftieth birthday, Julia has to experience that age makes you invisible. Frustrated, she goes shopping and makes an acquaintance, spontaneously deciding to spend the evening with this stranger, rather than with the guests of her own birthday party. Julia's guests wait for her in a restaurant, all dressed up and groomed, the signs of age concealed by make-up, lively debating the years that have passed. The truths and wisdoms of Julia's closest friends on aging and growing old are drowned increasingly in sufficient quantities of alcohol. Jessica and Fatima, both 14, are also out shopping - but in their very own manner. They are out looking for a birthday present and „find" gold sneakers for the 18-year-old they both have a crush on. The store detective, however, observes and arrests them. Cornelia and Max, Jessica's divorced parents, are crushed when informed that they are to pick up their child from the police station. Whose fault is it that their daughter apparently belongs to a lost generation? In the mean time, on her eightieth birthday, Leonie, sulking over the loss of youth, is rebelling against her daughter, the senior citizen's home, conventions, and old age in general - and joyfully sabotaging the party in her honor.

I've always been personally interested in how we age, in our mortality, and in the different phases of life. In 1988,1 directed my first feature length movie „Dreissig Jahre" ("Thirty Years"). It's the story of three friends who turn thirty and attempt to escape from the onset of the serious part of life - in different manners. It's a movie about the bitter-sweet farewell to youth. So it cannot be by pure coincidence that, 20 years later, T&C Film offered me this screenplay that has to do with a 50th birthday. I wrote the screenplay to „Dreissig Jahre" together with Martin Witz and it was based on very personal experiences. The present screenplay was written by Martin Suter, an author whose books and columns I always enjoy reading tremendously.