Nik Dellmann is released from prison after serving eight years. In the meantime his former girlfriend, Eva, has acquired a new man and a child and now wants to help him. Finding this new situation just too much, Nik takes refuge with a friend, Leila. He needs quiet because he wants to try to be a writer.

Suddenly Henry, his prison-mate, shows up and proposes a new heist. Nik turns him down. He wants nothing more to do with lousy little break-ins which will only send him back to prison again If Nik thinks of crime at all, it's about the big job': but first he is only writing about it in his novel Man without a Shadow Only after he has lost the hope of generating interest in his book and of ever re-uniting with Eva does he decide to really do the 'job'.

"Slow Attack cannot be separated from my own life,'' says the author and leading actor. Burkhard Driest. "I've been writing since I was sixteen... I knew that the ones I hated would print, bind and order away my hate so as to be left in peace Under the circumstances, they were willing to hand out a bit of praise and a few German marks.

I threw the last 200 pages of the novel in the trash and decided never to write or read again. Yet I still wanted to 'write' the stories which now would never find their way to paper, to write' them with my body. Not on paper, but unfolded in reality, executed with flesh and bone. And the characters I created were to be animated in those alive."