A young German journalist (Rüdiger Vogler) traverses America collecting impressions for an article. He takes Polaroid photographs but they don't translate; he never writes the article. Circumstances find him on a plane home in the company of eight-year-old Alice (Yella Rottlander). In Germany, they search for Alice's grandmother, with only a snapshot of her house-and Alice's memory of it "with a dark hall and trees in front"-to go on. Apart from being a marvelous picture of childhood rendered with humor but totally without sentimentality, Alice is a grown man's coming-of-age. A reverse Alice in Wonderland, it's his coming, blinking, out of myth (out of cinema) into reality. It's the loss, for a young European, of the America "that was handed to you," as a friend chastises. Young Mr. Lincoln is something you see on television in a dreary motel, interrupted by advertisements; and photographs-even traveling shots-"never really show what you've actually seen."