In 1942, Red Army officer Nikolai Kiselyov receives orders to evacuate over 200 Jewish women, children, and elderly men facing brutality and death in Nazi-occupied Belarus. These exhausted, starving, terrified and bereaved people, deeply scarred by the horrors they have witnessed, must trek hundreds of kilometers along forest paths to regain hope of survival and faith in the future.
One morning, the father of the family decides to fulfill his lifelong dream: to go with his family to the Grushinsky festival and perform his song there. The family is forced to come to terms with the desire of a tyrant father and go on a road trip across all of Russia. Along the way, they will have adventures, various tests and a test of their relationships for strength. But the most important thing they will understand only at the end of this extraordinary trip.
In a Russian coastal town, Kolya is forced to fight the corrupt mayor when he is told that his house will be demolished. He recruits a lawyer friend to help, but the man's arrival brings further misfortune for Kolya and his family.