Agnieszka Kowalska, toom store manager, leads a large team, optimises processes down to the last detail and always remains close to her staff. Her recipe for success: clear rules, a high degree of personal responsibility and a leadership style based on leading by example. As a mentor in the women’s advancement programme, she also supports female toom employees on their career paths.

Every morning, Verena Hammer starts with a tour of the warehouse. Shaking hands, listening, getting to know people: for the PENNY logistics manager from Norderstedt, appreciation is not just a buzzword, but part of her day-to-day leadership. With this approach, she has built trust and successfully developed her site.

The next stop on our tour of the region takes us to Hungary, a country rich in traditions, hospitality, and culinary diversity. Amid historic cities, numerous thermal baths, and a vibrant everyday culture, history, indulgence, and modernity come together here in a unique way.

Two directors have chosen breathtakingly beautiful settings for their bizarrely bloody stories. Photographer, author and director Anton Corbijn has set Patricia Highsmith’s *Strangers on a Train* in the Swiss Alps. In *Wild Horse Nine*, Irish filmmaker Martin McDonagh has two CIA agents philosophising about life on Easter Island – with their guns always at the ready. And Stephen King’s cult classic, the dark debut novel *Carrie*, is given an explosive update across eight episodes on Prime Video.

October brings film adaptations of works by two German authors to local cinemas. Andreas Dresen’s gruff yet cheerful romance *Alte Liebe* is based on stories by Elke Heidenreich and her ex-husband Bernd Schroeder. Volker Schlöndorff has tackled Jenny Erpenbeck’s bestseller *Heimsuchung*. For those who find all this too ‘realistically German’, the six-part series *Small Prophets* on Apple TV offers a chance to transport yourself into the realm of British mythology.

German cinema is making a splash this autumn with fictional stories based on real-life events. In “Vaterland”, Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski has Thomas Mann travel through post-war Germany in 1949 with his daughter Erika, a role in which Hanns Zischler and Sandra Hüller bring the perfect expression to this dark comedy. In Pauline Roenneberg’s family-oriented psychological comedy “Kalter Hund”, deadly chasms open up on the occasion of the patriarch’s 100th birthday. And with Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, the nefarious Babylon comes to an end in the fifth series of “Berlin Babylon”. But first, there is one final series of murders to solve, available from 10 September on the ARD Mediathek.