After being sentenced to death by the Bolsheviks, Nazar has conversations in his cell as he awaits execution with the commissar who sentenced him and a priest.
A group of people who happen to be on the same bus try to get home on the New Year's Eve, but their bus is delayed by numerous obstacles, and the tensions grow.
An author - a passive young man - enters the Soviet-controlled bureaucracy of Georgia attempting to get his novel published only to be neglected and compartmentalized at every turn.