The rat lives in a cage that stands in the room of a large communal apartment in which the poet lives. The apartment is in the house; House - in the yard-well; The courtyard is in the city; And in the courtyard - 1939 ...In the film there are many newsreel frames of those times, the sound series contains both popular and propagandist songs, both Soviet and German. The plot is divided into many unrelated episodes, which are colorized in different colors. The author claims that everything shown should be understood outside of symbolism: everything in the film means only itself.

Eisenstein shot 50 hours of footage on location in Mexico in 1931 and 32 for what would have become ¡Que viva México!, but was not able to finish the film. Following two wildly different reconstruction attempts in 1939 (Marie Seton's 'Time in the Sun') and 1979 (Grigori Alexandrov's '¡Que viva México!') Kovalov has here compiled another hypothetical version of what Eisenstein's film might have been.