In Her Hands

The hustle and bustle of a train station in Paris: people streaming around, rushed, anonymous, strangely blind and deaf to each other. Only one person does not fit this description. Mathieu Malinski has withdrawn to an island in the midst of this hustle and bustle. The young man sits at a public piano, playing entirely for himself and yet also for the whole world. And there is someone in the audience who realizes that the music is more than just distracting background noise for Mathieu: Pierre Geithner, director of the Paris Conservatoire. He would love to sponsor the young man, but Mathieu Malinski has already experienced too many disappointments to accept his good fortune. And so Mathieu rejects him. Until the day he stands trial for theft and has no one to turn to - except Pierre Geithner, who has his prison sentence commuted to community service at the conservatory. Pierre recognizes Mathieu's extraordinary talent and enters him in the country's most prestigious piano competition. Mathieu thus enters a world whose rules he does not know. Not only the strict piano teacher, "the Countess", who is supposed to prepare Mathieu for the competition, has well-founded doubts about his suitability. But Pierre is not to be deterred and stakes everything on Mathieu...