Christian Ingomar

The lawyer Franziska Schlüter works for the Aescuria insurance and is responsible for processing applications for disbursement of occupational disability policies. The company policy provides as a guideline to prevent the approval as far as possible. When the widow of a victim, who committed suicide after being rejected, storms the office to loudly accuse these machinations, Franziska begins to doubt the correctness of her work and to rethink. She quits and works as a freelance lawyer to help injured parties legally to get their rights. First she deals with the case of a family in the neighborhood. The father has been in a wheelchair since an accident. However, the Strelaus have not yet seen any money from the insurance company. Initially not taken seriously by colleagues, the shy woman takes on the fight against the health insurance system and has to fight against resistance and above all with her own self-doubt.

This two-part drama examines the fate of the generation of Austrians which came of age after World War II. The first part, "Arcadia," depicts the generational gap between 1950s teenagers and their parents, while the second part, "Injuries," shows this same group of characters twenty years later as they have grown up to become dysfunctional and suicidal adults. Regarded as the most significant of Michael Haneke’s early works, "Lemmings" contains incipient treatments of many of the themes he would later elaborate on in his theatrical features.