Moving to the city from the town of her birth where she was educated and did her teaching internship, twenty-seven year old Melanie Pröschle (Eva Löbau, INGLORIOUS BASTERDS) is bursting with progressive teaching models and ideas, proclaiming with good intentions that she hopes to be a "breath of fresh air" and alienating virtually all of the faculty at once. Naïve, socially inept, and withdrawing, Melanie can get none of her ideas across to the faculty nor can she assert herself to her less than receptive students. Although the faculty concede that the particular class has always been troubled and that it is even more of a challenge taking over in the middle of the term, they ultimately blame her lack of discipline for the conduct of the students. She makes friends with more worldly neighbor Tina (Daniela Holtz) but soon alienates her with her neediness, her frequent visits and chance drop-ins at work, and her stunning ignorance of social cues (which extends to her attempts to call and shoot the breeze with her parents). The only sympathetic ear she has is in fellow teacher Thorsten (Jan Neumann, SAFE CONDUCT) but what she sees as his coming on too strong is an inability to recognize the mirror of her own behavior. The thesis film of Maren Ade (EVERYONE ELSE), THE FOREST FOR THE TREES is painfully dead-on in its depiction of social awkwardness and isolation with which most viewers may be able to identify if only in parts.