Vice Lieutenant Eismayer is the most feared trainer and model macho in the Austrian Military and lives as a gay man in secret. When he falls in love with a young, openly gay soldier, his world gets turned upside down.
Karl meets Nini at a Berlin train station: it is love at first sight. But the few hours they spend together before she travels back to Vienna end in a mishap in which Karl loses her phone number. He decides to move to the Austrian capital to find his dream woman again.
1960's Siegheilkirchen, a small town in the Austrian hinterland is steeped in reactionary and ultra-Catholic attitudes. The son of a hard-working innkeeper and his wife, called Snotty Boy by all and sundry, is at odds with the narrow-minded confines of his home town. But his unstoppable talent for drawing gives him an outlet for his discontent.
When Fuchs starts his new job as a teacher in a prison school, replacing the old and unconventional teacher Berger against her will, he is forced to confront his biggest fear, triggered by the mysterious, withdrawn inmate Samira.