Touring the United States but finding himself unable to write a commissioned article about the country, German journalist Philip Winter (Rüdiger Vogler) instead finds himself able to do little more than listlessly flit from motel to motel snapping polaroids. However, a chance meeting with compatriot Lisa and her daughter Alice (Yella Rottländer) unexpectedly furnishes him with a new quest – to return the young girl to her grandmother's home in Germany with little more to go on than a photograph of her front door. Wim Wenders' international breakthrough – the first of his career-defining Road Movie trilogy – is both a tender, elegiac story of alienation and emotional rediscovery, and a quietly probing examination of the transatlantic cultural divide.