Melanie is optimistic about her new life but she is quickly demoralized by her difficulty making friends in the new city and by the unruly students she can't control.
At school, things take a turn for the worse when Melanie overhears two colleagues discussing her and how she lets the children run wild.
Upset, Melanie calls her mother, but rather than worry her, ends up cancelling her planned trip home to stay in Karlsruhe over vacation.
[7] Time Out commented "Eva Lbau's lynchpin performance as Melanie is a shattering lesson in the tropes of timidity and awkwardness, and serves in taking this cinema of cruelty into as yet uncharted territory".
[8] According to Eddie Cockrell of Variety "Tapping in to primal fears of professional ineptitude and social rejection with an almost sadistic meticulousness, The Forest for the Trees is a precisely modulated first film".