An academic heads to Leningrad to attend the funeral of an old friend.

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.

Before the end of the Second World War, a special commando marches into a mental hospital located in a beautiful manor house to eliminate the patients. But the Gestapo has received an anonymous letter saying that an enemy agent is hiding among the madmen. Officer Windisch is tasked with finding a simulant among several hundred mental patients in a matter of days.

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.