German director Wim Wenders was represented at iast year's festival by The Goalkeeper's Fear of the Penalty Kick. His later film, Alice in the Cities, is a chronologically ordered film about an extensive trip through America, Holland and Germany. Rudiger Vogeler plays a journalist, almost thirty and a bachelor, who is in the United States on a vague assignment from his newspaper to collect impressions and photographs for an article. At Kennedy Airport he meets a young woman and her eight year old daughter, Alice. They spend the night together, and the next day, the woman asks the journalist to take Alice with him to Europe. They arrange to meet in Amsterdam.

But the mother does not turn up, and the journalist leaves with Alice for the Ruhr, with little money and only the vaguest information on the whereabouts of Alice's grandmother. They travel through several cities, searching for 'an old house with a dark hall, and trees in front of it.' The journalist finally drops Alice off at a police station; but she runs away and finds him again. She is beginning to make him forget his ambitions in journalism and he finds himself liking her for just this reason.