The action takes place shortly after the end of the Second World War in the Siberian hinterland, among Russians and Germans with damaged personal stories and a strange transformation: the victors seem to be crawling into the skins of the defeated, and vice versa. Ignat, is the embodiment of the larger-than-life image of the Soviet victorious warrior who, in fact, proves to be shell-shocked, sick and broken, although not completely destroyed. Trains become fetish for the heroes of the film, and speed becomes a mania; they virtually become one with their steam engines, while the machines take on human names. The heroes set up an almost fatal race in the Siberian forest, risking their own lives and those of others.
Belorussia, summer 1942. The war has moved on, far off to the east. The life of a small town where the German authorities of the region have set themselves up is getting back to "normal". The Germans study Russian, flirt with the local girls, the women wash their clothes and feed them. They have to carry on somehow... But suddenly the teenage son of the film's heroine decides to run away to the partisans and blows up a German train so that they could accept him. He gets caught and the Germans have to execute him in order "to teach others a lesson". That's the order and it can't be disobeyed. The Germans know that this execution will bring an end to their peaceful lives. The local commandant understands this better than anyone as he is already involved in a close relationship with the boy's mother. But he can't ignore an order from his commanders...
When the hard-working bread-winner Katja and Hendrik the intellectual meet Saida, an illegal immigrant from Algeria, and accept to organize a "passport marriage" between her and Hendrik, they are caught up in a chain of events and feelings over which they have no control.
In the last winter of WWII a group of captive German soldiers is brought to a remote Russian village, where widows, a child and a crippled are the only ones left. This is a military drama about those, who can love and forgive.
