Backdrop fallback

Distant Lights

Distant Lights

Share

Distant Lights

2003

1h 45m

7.4(32 votes)

Drama

Overview

Lichter is an episodic tale from Hans-Christian Schmid about the life on the border between Germany and Poland. The film sheds light on the everyday stories of escape and desperateness.

Links & Resources

Social & External

Production Companies

ZDF

The people behind it

Cast & crew

10 featured cast members

Starring

Maria Simon

Maria Simon

Sonja

Alice Dwyer

Alice Dwyer

Katharina

Devid Striesow

Devid Striesow

Ingo

Sebastian Urzendowsky

Sebastian Urzendowsky

Andreas

August Diehl

August Diehl

Philip

Herbert Knaup

Herbert Knaup

Klaus

Ivan Shvedoff

Ivan Shvedoff

Kolja

Sergey Frolov

Sergey Frolov

Dimitri

Anna Yanovskaya

Anna Yanovskaya

Anna

Martin Kiefer

Martin Kiefer

Marko

Creative team

Directed by: Hans-Christian Schmid
Written by: Michael Gutmann
Hans-Christian Schmid
Produced by: Jakob Claussen
Thomas Wöbke

Similar Movies

No Surrender

No Surrender

Amelia's blog empowering women not to tolerate violent relationships has brought her fame, fortune and now someone is out to kill her. Is it the new man in her life, her now paroled ex who inspired the blog, or a deranged fan? Just as she has put the pieces of her life back together, Amelia must figure out who is behind the bizarre string of attacks and stop them before her own life comes to an ironic and violent end.

The Other Side of the Mirror

The Other Side of the Mirror

A nightclub singer is haunted by the ghost of her late father. The dead man summons her through a mirror, forcing her to commit a series of violent crimes.

Marfa Girl

Marfa Girl

A disaffected Texas teen spends his 16th birthday getting high, hanging out and having casual sex.

Eagle's Wing

Eagle's Wing

Two men, an aging Native American and a ne'er-do-well trapper from North America, race to claim the stallion Eagle's Wing in antebellum Mexico, meeting marauded stagecoach travelers and garrisoned Mexicans along the way.

No Picnic

No Picnic

Down-and-out jukebox operator Macabee Cohn wanders the cheap tenements, dive bars, and derelict streets of the East Village in search of a mysterious woman in a striped dress.

Go Ask Alice

Go Ask Alice

A 15-year-old girl in late 1960's America is inadvertently sucked into an odyssey of sex and drugs. She eventually seeks help.

Worship Awry

Worship Awry

This film follows a worship leader who questions her faith after a robbery incident.

The Goddess

The Goddess

A young prostitute, who is trying to give her infant son a good start in life, must contend with a coercive pimp and the prejudices of others.

Street Angel

Street Angel

In old Shanghai, two sisters, a prostitute and a singer, try to escape from the local scoundrels with the help of a trumpet player and a newspaper seller.

Thursdays for the Poor

Thursdays for the Poor

A young doctor has been assigned to a hospital in the provinces, in the lakes district of northern Poland. The area is a playground with hunting lodges for the priviledged, the local politicians cover up any leaks to the public. The doctor discovers a case of drunken driving but is silenced by blackmail in the court. He tries to fight back but has a love affair with the unfaithful wife of the town's Mayor.

The Beniker Gang

The Beniker Gang

When his younger friends go up for adoption, threatening their extended family, an orphaned teen helps them discourage potential parents.

Angels Who Burn Their Wings

Angels Who Burn Their Wings

Munich at night: Robert Susmeit, a 16-year-old teenager who is jealously obsessed with his mother Hilde, traces her and her latest lover at a mundane apartment building where he kills the man in the heat of the moment at a swimming pool. His fatal outburst is secretly witnessed by Moni Dingeldey, a girl of the same age as his. Fascinated by the shaken and devastated strange boy who she hopes to be a soul-mate, she hides Robert in her mother's apartment. Meanwhile, a crowd of policemen and reporters frantically comb through the building in search a murderer whose identity is known only to Robert's parents who are searching as well...

Smooth Operator

Smooth Operator

Megan Hughes plays Grace Nichols, a businesswoman constantly competing with men to get ahead. Unfortunately, her love life is also suffering. One day, while chomping on a donut, she realizes she's put on a few pounds. She decides to get back in shape, and asks her secretary Angie Li (Candace Kita) if she could recommend a good personal trainer. Angie recommends Brian Lerner (Doug Jeffery), a guy Angie's also been sleeping with for the last few months. Of course, Grace doesn't know that. Grace meets up with Brian, and it's innocent at first. She tosses on the workout clothes, he comes over to help her out with exercising, and goes home. Simple enough, right? However, this is a softcore flick, so you know the sex is coming. Eventually, Grace asks Brian to accompany her to a formal dinner.

Blackmail for Beginners

Blackmail for Beginners

In desperate need of $150,000 for his father's heart transplant, Simen tries to blackmail a dysfunctional robber.

Men in Exile

Men in Exile

An ex-con takes flight after he's framed for a jewelry store robbery and murder.

The Grief Tourist

The Grief Tourist

JIM TAHANA doesn't leave much of an impression when he passes you by. But look closer and you'll sense his hunger - the deep hunger of an insatiable American soul - always scanning to devour something - anything that might fill the searing, unexplained void within him. Jim obsesses over the hobby that has been part of his DNA since he was a young boy: grief tourism - the act of traveling with the intent to visit places of tragedy or disaster. Every year his week-long vacations from work are spent going to grief tourist locations in the lives of different serial killers he is fascinated with. This years obsession is Carl Marznap, a mass murder from New Orleans, Louisiana. But this trip is no ordinary vacation as Jim's rancid sexual impulses and weakening grip on reality deteriorate into a violent despair that will ultimately unlock an unspeakable secret festering within him, bringing The Grief Tourist to it's brutal and shocking finale...

Archive

Archive

2038: George Almore is working on a true human-equivalent AI, and his latest prototype is almost ready. This sensitive phase is also the riskiest as he has a goal that must be hidden at all costs—being reunited with his dead wife.

Angela

Angela

In this biopic about the life and death of Ângela Diniz, Angela meets Raul and believes she has found someone who loves her free spirit as much as she does. The overwhelming attraction makes the couple drop everything and live the dream of rebuilding their lives on the beach. But the relationship declines into abuse and violence, giving rise to one of the most remembered murders in Brazil.

Molly

Molly

After Dan collapses at a train station, he enlists Maxie to watch his beloved dog, Molly. Maxie develops a soft spot for her new furry companion - a dog which has a unique ability to sing in tune.

Dissolve

Dissolve

In Almaty, a sheltered and chaste woman named Din sees her life intertwined with the experiences of a prostitute who looks like her.

Recommended Movies

Trafficked

Trafficked

In this story inspired by real characters, three girls from America, Nigeria and India are trafficked through an elaborate global network and enslaved in a Texas brothel, and must together attempt a daring escape to reclaim their freedom.

Berlin Alexanderplatz

Berlin Alexanderplatz

In 2015, thirty year old refugee Francis, the sole survivor of a boat that illegally crossed the Mediterranean, is drawn into Berlin's seedy underbelly.

Joy

Joy

Close to paying off her debts, a Nigerian sex worker in Austria coaches a reluctant novice, and assesses the risks of taking a faster path to freedom.

Stroszek

Stroszek

Bruno Stroszek is released from prison and warned to stop drinking. He has few skills and fewer expectations: with a glockenspiel and an accordion, he ekes out a living as a street musician. He befriends Eva, a prostitute down on her luck and they join his neighbor, Scheitz, an elderly eccentric, when he leaves Germany to live in Wisconsin.

Eden

Eden

After a night out with friends, Hyun Jae accepts a late night ride home from a young fire fighter. What begins as a night of promise quickly turns into a nightmare when she is abducted and imprisoned outside Las Vegas as a sex slave.

Bound

Bound

Corky, a tough female ex-convict working on an apartment renovation in a Chicago building, meets a couple living next door, Caesar, a paranoid mobster, and Violet, his seductive girlfriend, who is immediately attracted to her.

Christiane F.

Christiane F.

A teen girl in 1970s Berlin becomes addicted to heroin. Everything in her life slowly begins to distort and disappear as she befriends a small crew of junkies and falls in love with a drug-abusing male prostitute.

The Air I Breathe

The Air I Breathe

A gambler’s bet spiraling into chaos, a gangster's prophetic visions, a pop star’s dark entanglement, a doctor’s desperate race against time to rescue his beloved... Four interconnected stories reveal life unfolding through four emotional pillars — joy, passion, grief, and love.

The American

The American

Dispatched to a small Italian town to await further orders, assassin Jack embarks on a double life that may be more relaxing than is good for him.

The Tin Drum

The Tin Drum

In 1924, Oskar Matzerath is born in the Free City of Danzig. At age three, he falls down a flight of stairs and stops growing. In 1939, World War II breaks out.

The Lives of Others

The Lives of Others

In 1984 East Berlin, dedicated Stasi officer Gerd Wiesler begins spying on a famous playwright and his actress-lover Christa-Maria. Wiesler becomes unexpectedly sympathetic to the couple, and faces conflicting loyalties when his superior takes a liking to Christa-Maria.

Antares

Antares

A deadly car crash sets off three parallel stories of women at crisis points, faltering behind the doors of the same, plain Vienna apartment block.

Requiem

Requiem

Michaela, an epileptic, enrolls in college to study education. She goes off her medication and soon begins hearing voices and seeing apparitions that tell her to avoid religious objects, although she is devoutly Roman Catholic. One priest scoffs at the idea that Michaela could be possessed by demons, but a younger pastor arranges an exorcism for the young woman.

Crimes of Passion

Crimes of Passion

Fashion designer Joanna Crane leads a double life. By night she is China Blue, a prostitute who's attracted the attention of a sexually frustrated private detective, and a psychopathic priest in possession of a murderous sex toy.

Import/Export

Import/Export

A nurse from Ukraine searches for a better life in the West, while an unemployed security guard from Austria heads East for the same reason. Both are looking for work, a new beginning, an existence, struggling to believe in themselves, to find a meaning in life...

Jerichow

Jerichow

In a small Northern German town, a dishonourably discharged Afghanistan veteran is offered a job as a deliveryman by an alcoholic Turkish entrepreneur, through which the former meets the latter's gorgeous wife.

The Drop

The Drop

Bob Saginowski finds himself at the center of a robbery gone awry and entwined in an investigation that digs deep into the neighborhood's past where friends, families, and foes all work together to make a living - no matter the cost.

Enter the Void

Enter the Void

This psychedelic tour of life after death is seen entirely from the point of view of Oscar, a young American drug dealer and addict living in Tokyo with his prostitute sister, Linda. When Oscar is killed by police during a bust gone bad, his spirit journeys from the past -- where he sees his parents before their deaths -- to the present -- where he witnesses his own autopsy -- and then to the future, where he looks out for his sister from beyond the grave.

The Nines

The Nines

A troubled actor, a television show runner, and an acclaimed videogame designer find their lives intertwining in mysterious and unsettling ways.

Girl in the Bunker

Girl in the Bunker

When Elizabeth is abducted by a fugitive sexual predator, she realizes she must take matters into her own hands and plot her escape. Based on a true story.