Claude Bertrand

Tania, a young actress, puts everything at stake for her starring role in Dotez's play. But Dotez, blocked and hostile to Tania, only frees himself as the rehearsals progress, while his actress is exhausted in her daily life, divided between Yan, her lover, and Lila, his little daughter.

This documentary is an autobiography based on director Depardon's voice, his face and pictures from his childhood which are all mixed together on screen and contrasted with selected pictures he shot between 1957 and 1977 and now comments on.

The time is the 1930s and two Soviet spies (both Frenchmen by nationality) have been helping Communist factions during the Civil War in Spain. It is the time of Stalin's iron rule in the USSR, and the two agents are suddenly called to Moscow by the KGB. Knowing that they are in trouble for no fault of their own, fear drives one of them to suicide while the other gets his lover and her child and begins a run for his life, knowing that the KGB will never let him go free.