Penniless and without a future, an English teacher agrees to tutor a pampered woman, only to become enmeshed in a strange reality and a downward spiral of desire and illusion, guilt and self-contempt. Will the ugly truth set him free?

During the cold spring of 1941, with Greece already under German occupation, a long-suffering squad of war-battered soldiers receives orders from the headquarters in Athens to fall back, leaving behind the Albanian Front. As the men retreat through the snow-covered landscapes of the bomb-scarred Greek countryside, the terrifying certainty that nothing will ever be the same again crushes their weary human souls.

A traveling theatre troupe tours the Greek countryside from 1939 to the early 1950s, staging “Golfo the Shepherdess”. As the years pass, its members endure persecution, betrayal, executions, and exile. Their personal stories become entangled with the country’s major historical events, in a seemingly endless cycle of violence and loss.

In Cyprus, an EOKA fighter (against the British Administration), Kyriakoulis, is imprisoned by the British. His comrades kidnap the son of a friend of the British Administrator in retaliation. Plans to help Kyriakoulis escape fails and the British hang him. Kyriakoulis mother intervenes magnanimously and the fighters free their prisoner.

A provincial café owner, Mimis, abandons his village in Chalkidiki and comes to Athens in search of a better life. He pretends to be a tough guy, a know-it-all, and behaves like an “antisocial”. With the help of a friend of his from the army, Aristeidis, he tries to set up his own business. At the same time, he falls in love with a seamstress, Toula, who is the sister of Aristeidis’ wife. Then comes the wedding, the everyday obligations, and Mimis is forced, with great resentment, to work as a waiter to make ends meet. When he get fired, however, his relationship with Nitsa is put to the test.

The story of Ioannis Zachos, a young psychopath who commits a murder in Athens.