Disgraced journalist Max Raban is reduced to raking though bins for celebrity stories, a thankless task that suits him because of his phobia of daylight. His condition has already driven his wife and daughter away and he's desperate for a real story. When he uncovers the murder of two Iranian cousins, Max starts to suspect that there is a death squad at work, targeting pro-Islamists and backed by an organisation bent on waging perpetual war. Is Max an investigative journalist at last?

At 41, Erwin Kobarek still lives with his mother, with whom he runs a petrol station in the countryside. A relationship has not yet materialized for Erwin. When his mother senses that her son needs a wife, she sends Erwin to a marriage agency in Romania. And indeed, Erwin returns with a young Romanian woman, Irina Bobescu. She sets something irreversible in motion in him: the detachment from his mother and the moulting from boy to belated man.

2004 television film directed by Gillies MacKinnon