The winner of the FIPRESCI prize at the Berlin Film Festival, Distant Lights plays like a German Short Cuts, focused on the situation around the border between Poland and Germany. If Altman's cinematic short story collection was given unity by its origin in Raymond Carver's dark fables of the disadvantaged American male, then Distant Lights — the original script of which has no literary parentage — finds its common thread in the theme of the border, specifically, the German-Polish border, one of the European Union's more permeable frontiers.