Two beautiful young women kill men in a villa in Tuscany: Maya and Cora have been friends since childhood. Maya has an alcoholic artist father who deserted the family, a mentally disturbed mother and a violent brother, Carlo. Cora is from a wealthy middle-class family. Cora helps Maya to poison Carlo's friend Detlef, who is threatening to blackmail her. They then kill Carlo when he tries to rape Cora. Cora's family takes Maya in, and a happy time begins for her, particularly when they spend the summer in Italy.

Verfilmung nach der gleichnamigen Erzählung von Ingeborg Bachmann

In 1939, after barely escaping the Nazis, a Gypsy family returns to Switzerland only to be torn apart by racial persecution in the benign guise of children's welfare. This fictionalized story of Jana, an eight-year-old Gypsy girl snatched from her parents and consigned to a life of orphanages and bleak foster homes, is based on a little-known chapter of Swiss history: From 1926 to 1972, the state-supported Pro Juventute, a children's aid foundation, forcibly removed some 700 Gypsy children from their families, in order to sever the ties with their culture and assimilate them to a "better way of life." The underlying aim was to preempt a new generation's caravans from following their nomadic traditions along Switzerland's country lanes.