A poetic essay on the city of St. Petersburg in the 18th century, based on poems by Alexander Pushkin and Alexander Blok and a novel by Andrey Belyi. The film contains reworked footage from Aleksey Batalov's "Overcoat", Eisenstein´s "Strike", Petrov's "Peter The First", Tikhomirov's "The Queen Of Spades" and others. Petersburg is an unbounded visual fantasy where reality and imagination merge into one. The history of the city represented in a digital form may live its independent life. Yevteyeva presents sights of St.Petersburg that have become the genetic code of the Russian culture in a particular manner in her film. Each shot of the film was hand-painted with special strokes.

In this dreamlike film, a nameless father and his son, Aleksei, live together in an apartment in St. Petersburg. Aleksei's mother has died and consequently the two have a very close relationship. When Aleksei acquires a girlfriend, she refuses to take a back seat to his bond with his dad, and breaks up with him. Aleksei is also experiencing nightmares, dreading separation from his father to be a part of the military as his father was.

Closely based on Franz Kafka's book "Das Schloß", the movie shares the same action on a land surveyor who is called to a village to do a job that no one seems to have ordered. Once there, he takes up the struggle against bureaucracy emanating from the castle.