The truck is on its way to Southampton, but a warning signal forces the driver to stop just past Hanover. When he opens the pallet box, several people rush out and run away. What remains is a dead young man who the police in Hanover cannot identify – a case for the federal police and thus for the NDR “Tatort” team Thorsten Falke (Wotan Wilke Möhring) and Julia Grosz (Franziska Weisz).
At the same time, a father plucks up courage to find his missing son and asks for help at a police station. This is no small thing for Jon (Alois Moyo), because the man who came to Germany from Zimbabwe eleven years ago has been living in Germany with his wife Hope (Sheri Hagen) and his 17-year-old son Noah since then without any identity papers. Of course, he is held at the police station, but then he gets caught by Falke, who prefers to rely on his sense of justice than on paragraphs. Jon’s son Noah is not the dead one, so Falke accompanies the father into the world of the undocumented.
Wotan Wilke Möhring has been playing the taciturn, empathetic federal police officer for ten years now and the anniversary episode “Hidden” (ARD, 8:15 p.m.) suitably accentuates the strengths of the figure. In addition to a well-informed description of the milieu, the touching drama convinces with a complicated crime story about young men who dream of a better life, about smugglers, builders and a doctor whose unselfish work reaches its limits.
In all of this, Falke is the policeman one could only wish for. “We don’t even exist. We are invisible,” says Jon. “You are not invisible to me,” answers Falke.
