A night-shift love story about the Germans reunification left behind

In the Aisles is a 2018 film by the German director Thomas Stuber, a quiet love story set on the night shift of a huge wholesale store in eastern Germany. Its workers are people who lost their footing when East Germany ceased to exist after reunification, when the communist East joined the West. The film never lectures about that history. It lets the store become a refuge, which is why it lands as warm rather than bleak.

Christian is a shy young man who takes a job stocking shelves at night. Bruno, an older worker from the drinks aisle, takes him under his wing and teaches him to drive a forklift. Christian falls for Marion, who works in the sweets aisle next door. She is married, and the film follows what grows between them in the hours when the store is closed.

Where did the story come from?

The film is adapted from a short story of the same name by Clemens Meyer, a novelist from Leipzig, a city in the former East. Before he became a published writer, Meyer worked as a security guard, a construction worker and a forklift driver. The story appeared in his 2008 collection Die Nacht, die Lichter, published in English as All the Lights, which won the Leipzig Book Fair Prize.

Stuber said he read the collection years earlier and could not shake the atmosphere of the night-time wholesale market, or the poetic language, in which the big questions of life come up in short lines of dialogue. Meyer and Stuber wrote the screenplay together. It was their third film as a team, after the short Of Dogs and Horses, which won Silver at the Student Academy Awards in 2012, and the feature A Heavy Heart, which won the German Film Award in Silver in 2016.

Why does East Germany matter here?

Stuber has said that the city in the film could be Leipzig, Chemnitz or Halle, and that the time matters more than the place: the years after reunification. In his words, Bruno, the oldest worker, lived through a break in his life when East Germany fell. He had to start over and feels left behind. Christian and Marion are younger, but were shaped by what their parents went through, and they also feel they do not belong.

So together they turn the store into a private world, shut off from a society they find cold. Stuber called it a humanist film and said he hoped his love for the characters would pass to the audience. That is the film's real subject: not the romance alone, but how people build a home inside a job when the country around them has changed.

What does it look like?

It opens with forklifts gliding through the aisles to The Blue Danube, the Johann Strauss waltz that Stanley Kubrick used for spaceships in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The joke is gentle, and it sets the tone: machines and stacked pallets treated as something close to a ballet. Critics have compared its deadpan humour to Aki Kaurismäki, the Finnish director known for dry comedies about working people, and to Roy Andersson, the Swedish director of slow, absurd tableaux.

The film was shot from late February to mid April 2017 in Leipzig, Bitterfeld, Wittenberg and Karlsruhe.

How was it received?

In the Aisles premiered in the main competition of the Berlin International Film Festival in February 2018, and won the festival's Prize of the Ecumenical Jury. Franz Rogowski, the German actor who plays Christian, won the 2018 German Film Award, the Lola, for best leading actor. Sandra Hüller, who plays Marion, went on to be nominated for the best actress Oscar for Anatomy of a Fall at the 2024 Academy Awards.

Who is it for?

It suits anyone who likes slow, tender love stories, comedy that never raises its voice, and films about work and the people who do it at night. It is in German and runs 125 minutes.

Drama