"A portrait of patients and staff of a hospital emergency room, and a meditation on communal and individual stress. The film records three weeks in an emergency room of a hospital in Kreuzberg, an 'inner-city' area of proletarian Berlin inhabited by the poorer working class, immigrants, artists and unemployed" (Laurence Kardish). "The nurses and doctors know they cannot really comfort the people they are treating. All of the social and human problems of Kreuzberg are concentrated here, accentuated: there is a lack of communication with the foreigners, the drunks, the quarrelsome, the addicts.... The film follows three patients (and) raises the question of what will become of these people when they leave the hospital.... The conclusion one could reach applies to other social institutions: when treatment is necessary it is already too late" (The Goethe Institute, Brussels).