The film is set in Lithuania after the Second World War. It shows dramatic events in a small Lithuanian farming community, where people are split between the Soviets and the "brothers in the woods", who are fighting to defend their land from the Soviets after the end of the Second World War.
When a widowed fisherman moves in with his brother and sister-in-law to escape the collapsing Nazi forces, he finds himself caught up, like Lithuania itself, in perilous questions of collaboration and occupation, resistance and escape.
An academic heads to Leningrad to attend the funeral of an old friend.
