Mientras descansa en una playa de California al final del verano, los pensamientos de Jane Marsh vuelan hacia el pasado, hacia su infancia trasncurrida en la finca Elvie, en un remoto rincón de Escocia. Jane recuerda con nostalgia las colinas cubiertas de hierba y el lago solitario, pero también a algunas personas difíciles de olvidar como su abuela, y principalmente, Sinclari, el atractivo Sinclair con quien soñaba casarse y afincarse en Elvie para siempre.
Winter 1968. Historian Dr. Dallow is released from prison. He is still trying to cope with and understand why he was put behind bars for 21 months for defamation of the state. His supposed "crime:" for five minutes he accompanied a cabaret chanson on the piano. The film shows what "ordinary socialism" was like, letting the audience feel the threat under which the people in the GDR had to live over many years.
The film describes the activity of an ABV of the People's Police in its section in East Berlin. A mixture of “positive” characters from the beginning, the extensively staged “owl”, who is introduced as a criminal and over the course of time, especially due to the influence of the ABV, develops into a good citizen, and incorrigible characters, with whom the ABV fails with its extensive attempts at rehabilitation and who are arrested after having committed again offenses.