After work on an autumn day in Stuttgart. The city is stuck in traffic. Everyone wants to go home, nobody is making progress. A young girl lies dead on the side of the road in a residential area. Fracture of the base of the skull, this could be a hit-and-run accident, but it could also be an intentional homicide. The only witness is only three years old and therefore unreliable, as Sebastian Bootz finds out during the rather laborious questioning. The only road from the crime scene leads straight into the traffic jam. So Thorsten Lannert makes his way to the line of wagons, where nothing is moving at all, secures tracks, collects statements and encounters the whole spectrum of increasingly irritated returnees. One of them has to be the culprit and the inspectors want to catch him before the traffic jam clears.
After successful cinema films such as "Kreuzweg", "Heil" and "3 Zimmer Küche Bad", Dietrich Brüggemann is making his Tatort debut on SWR with the Stuttgart investigative team Thorsten Lannert and Sebastian Bootz, played by Richy Müller and Felix Klare. For the film, which he wrote together with Daniel Bickermann, he was inspired by a situation that was just as everyday as it was unnerving: the traffic jam on the city's access roads, which was further fueled by construction work. On the Weinsteige in Stuttgart, Lannert and Bootz meet a colorful cross-section of the urban population in the crowd of suspects standing in a traffic jam, played by Julia Heinemann, Roland Bonjour, Rüdiger Vogler, Amelie Kiefer, Deniz Ekinci, Eckhard Greiner, Susanne Wuest, Bernd Gnann and Jacob Matschenz.
The traffic jam scenes were filmed in a trade fair hall in Freiburg, where a 100-metre wall built on the mountain side and an 80-metre blue screen on the valley side provided a traffic- and weather-independent setting for 13 days of shooting.