While waiting for her teenage son, Tia works around the house and organizes her memories. The film is composed of small domestic moments with the two, overlaid with glimpses of images and sounds recalled by the protagonist - tensed scenes from the factory, letters from her late husband, photos from when she was little. A certain childhood episode keeps coming back and overlaps a meeting with a familiar-looking man, whom Tia doesn't want to make future plans with.
As he gradually turns mad, the dancer Nijinsky evokes the important episodes of his life. In costumes and sets of lush beauty, the divine puppet performs in a final show where the secondary characters are named: Diaghilev, Isadora Duncan, Stravinsky, Auguste Rodin, Léon Bakst.
Joseph Mnwana arrives at Heathrow on a flight from Johannesburg and asks for political asylum. But what is he fleeing from? The authorities are suspicious, and Joseph has an uncertain future in store.
In 1973 Vietnam, gas bombs are dropped on villages, killing men, women, and children. Two downed American pilots, accused of the bombings, are captured and tortured.
On a West German Autobahn, Robert plummets from a bridge and is hospitalized. As he recovers, he flashes back to a Bulgarian holiday where he met Jutta and her uncle Lothar, who’d ordered a West German passport to smuggle her out of the DDR.
