Ilze Burkovska, a little girl who is obsessed with stories of World War II and will be a filmmaker in a distant future, lives in Latvia under the totalitarian boot of the Soviets and the ominous shadow of the many menaces and horrors of the Cold War.

Pjetr Painter is a common clerk in Riga. From he starts his tragicomic and sometimes even surreal journey from boring routine job and romantic affairs to preparations to revolutionise the world in Wien. He finds himself in psycho analysis session with Freud and even being seduced by Mata Hari in Paris. The story set in 1913 will show the gradation from Pjetrs disapproval of Kafka’s and Proust’s ideas to destruction of consciousness and drowning into self-destructible world of insanity. It reveals the importance of a single person’s participation in creation of the new world order – the glory and misery of this journey.

The love story of sixteen-year-old Arturs is interrupted by the First World War. After losing his mother and his home, he finds some consolation in joining the army, because this is the first time national battalions are allowed in the Russian Empire. But war is nothing like Arturs imagined – no glory, no fairness. It is brutal and painful. Arturs is now completely alone as war takes the lives of his father and brother. Also, no progress is made in the promised quick resolution of the war and timely return home. Within the notion that only he alone cares about returning home and that his homeland is just a playground for other nations, Arturs finds strength for the final battle and eventually returns home to start everything from scratch, just like his newly born country.