Successful film director Dmitry Pavlovich must fly by plane to Moscow and then to Rome. But the phone rings in his house and he is told that his old mother, who lives in Melovatka, his native village, has fallen ill. Dmitry Pavlovich hires a taxi and begins his “autumn journey to his mother.”

Young journalist Andrei Petrushov, who devoted a lot of time to searching for the missing manuscript of the writer Pustyrev, who was repressed in 1937, temporarily gets a job teaching Russian language and literature at school...