While in hospital, “Hoffi” Hoffmann, who has a record for criminal assault, meets Urban, an engineer who has worked on numerous building projects in other communist countries. To emulate him, Hoffi starts working in construction. On a large site in Saxony, he meets student trainee Gila and falls in love. With the support of his crew, Hoffi manages to follow Gila to East Berlin, where it turns out that she is pregnant … Director Ingrid Reschke, one of the few female directors working at East Germany’s state film studio DEFA, uses the re-integration into society of a convicted young offender to depict societal problems – young rowdies, a housing shortage in the East German capital, child neglect by single mothers. Shot largely on location, the film hews to the tradition of the “Berlin films” of the 1950s and 1960s to depict a tolerant, cosmopolitan society. In addition to Urban and a committed social worker, members of East Germany’s Socialist Unity Party also have a hand in making the prophecy expressed in the film’s working title, “even problem children can become people”, come true. Ingrid Reschke died as the result of a car accident shortly after the film was completed.