Time of darkness. Time of fire kindled against cold and fear. During the Holy Night, the seven year old Micha has to escape with his young mother Marianne from the violence of his drunken father... During their one week odyssey through frozen Germany, mother and son meet people to offer them shelter... Crushed by their own poverty, or dominated by their feelings of being lost, these people just hurt them deeper and they can be nothing other than stations of their continuous escape

Director Keleman tells the story of a couple that's on the verge of breaking up. A man is unemployed, bored with life, impassive, and doesn't want to admit to his girlfriend he loves her. They separate for one night. The film follows their nocturnal encounters with other people on the fringes of society. Abendland tries to depict a couple that suffers from a fin de siecle crisis in a world that looks even more gruesome than the former Eastern bloc ever did.

Shot in a Andrei Tarkovsky manner, this film is as repellent as their main characters. It bores its audience with hand-held video close-ups and songs from a washed-up female nightclub singer.

The paths of people from various countries cross during the course of one night. They speak different languages, but they are fatefully bound together by the solitary quest for happiness and deliverance. Sloping paths are all that's left for them in an age of lost perspectives, lost refuges and lost homelands. They sink deeper with every movement that should be liberating them. Every gesture of love becomes a gesture of humiliation. The desperate dance of their life has become a passionate dance of death.
In the centre of this centrifuge at the end of the millennium the Russian emigrant Valery and his lover Ljuba are turning around each other in a nocturnal round dance of desire and pain, hope and violence and the indestructible will to survive.