With the recent rush of emigrants to West Germany from the East, Michael Klier's film could not be timelier. His protagonist, Jerzy (Miroslav Baka), emanates from Warsaw. In West Berlin, Jerzy meets other Poles whose lives have progressed no further than menial jobs far below those they held in Poland. He himself begins working for a caterer, then, being ambitious, collecting payments for a loan shark. An affair with a woman, Ewa, ends abruptly when she admits that she had imagined life in the West to be quite different and disappears without a trace. Actually, for Jerzy, West Berlin is a sort of pit-stop on the way to the Promised Land-America-but as ZDF's Brigitte Kramer writes, "Questions as to which land is home and which destination are not important for the film's atmosphere. The world comprises stations of passage. Life is temporary. Michael Klier shows a life in exile, full of melancholy. There are places here that look like the fringes of the Western world..." Klier, who himself was born in Czechoslovakia in 1943 and lived first in Paris and now in West Berlin, no doubt knows the emigrant's experience first-hand. Klier's previous works include the videotapes Der Riese (The Giant, 1983, PFA '87), a feature composed entirely of video-surveillence footage; En Passant (1984) and Hotel Tapes (1986).