Animation sequences of game pieces, fashion drawings, autobiographical notes and legal files are layered by the filmmaker Betina Kuntzsch into a cinematic collage about the life of her mother, a fashion designer in the German Democratic Republic, GDR. In Chinese Checkers she illustrates a 20th century biography: growing up in the Nazi era, teenage years in post-war Germany, the building of The Wall, and life in the GDR as well as in a united Germany after the fall of The Wall. It is a story of escaping and conforming, playing along and doubting.