The man without a shadow

Joachim Vernau (Jan Josef Liefers) and Marie Luise (Stefanie Stappenbeck) are renovating their law office, which has been badly damaged by a gas explosion, when they are unexpectedly visited by the reserved lady Katherina Gebhardt (Gudrun Landgrebe). Her assignment: Vernau is to search Havana for her brother Martin, who disappeared without a trace thirty years ago.
Martin Gebhardt supposedly “emigrated” to the GDR in 1980, but never arrived there, his sister found out. Instead, every year they would receive information that Martin was still alive, sometimes in the USA, sometimes in Cuba. Since she was now forced to sell her house, their joint inheritance, because of a financial bottleneck, Katherina Gebhardt asked the lawyers to find her brother in Havana.
But Marie Luise falls from a ladder during the renovation work so unhappily that she has to go to hospital injured and Vernau sets off alone for Cuba. When he arrives in Havana, he encounters a wall of silence in his search for Martin Gebhardt. Only through the attractive and mysterious hotel employee Anna-Maria Martinez (Alina Levshin) does he learn that Gebhardt is a “man without a shadow” – a ‘hombre sin sombra’. His name comes up in connection with corruption and the mysterious death of an Interior Ministry employee.
Vernau manages to get through to Martin Gebhardt (Henry Hübchen) with his disarming charm and great tenacity. After initial mistrust, Gebhardt signs the power of sale. As a parting gift, he invites Vernau to his tobacco plantation. Vernau faxes the signature to Katherina Gebhardt in Berlin the same night. The difficult assignment now seems to have been successfully completed, and he wants to enjoy the rest of his time in Havana in private. After all, the passionate affair between Anna-Maria and him needs to be nurtured. Then the two are disturbed by Katherina’s phone call: This man in Havana can definitely not be her brother!
What began so exotically turns into a horror trip: For Vernau has obviously come across someone who has assumed the identity of a dead man and also knows no scruples. He answers uncomfortable questions in his own way: with murder!
The film was directed by Carlo Rola and written by Elisabeth Herrmann. A production of Network Movie Film- und Fernsehproduktion, Jutta Lieck-Klenke. Producers are Jutta Lieck-Klenke and Dietrich Kluge. The editorial office at ZDF is Daniel Blum