At the center of Menzel's latest film is a Chaplinesque everyman named Jan Dite (whose name translates as John Child). When we first meet Jan (Oldrich Kaiser) he's being released from a 1950s Prague prison after serving a sentence imposed by the Communists. Now's he's been dropped off in the middle of an abandoned German town near the Czech border where he slowly begins to clean things up. As he cleans, he takes us on a journey back through his life.