June 21, 1941. Soviet film director Frolov goes to a remote border region of Belarus to film another propaganda film about a model collective farm. He has no idea that a day later everything will change dramatically and he will, by the will of fate, rush between the stupid laws of the fascist and Soviet dictatorships, the arbitrariness of the partisans, the inertia of the peasants and the lawlessness of criminals. Death will follow on his heels, and he will run away from it, getting bogged down deeper and deeper in the sticky absurdity of war with its senseless victims, fictitious heroic battles, arrests and interrogations... And what is it worth for the hapless director to cross an unknown river in a coffin, and even in accompanied by a giant wooden statue of Stalin? But this chaos will only slightly dull the pain of the feeling of loneliness and the inability to realize one’s creative gift in conditions when the artist is required not to be independent, but to be able to please: the regime, the people, who cares?