1945. The women do the work in a remote village while the men are fighting the Nazis. A small group of deserters is hiding in the mountains and little Bahtiyar acts as the liaison between the men and the village.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s the Armenian minority in Nagorono-Karabakh attempted to break away from Azerbaijan, one of the former Soviet republics. Overnight these former neighbors became enemies, and simple village folk were suddenly made hostages in a complex power game. One of the Azerbaijani villages right on the border is home to the family of the peasant farmer Kerim, who has just been captured by the Armenians. The village council decides to take an Armenian in order to arrange a hostage exchange. They imprison the wounded man in the barn next to Kerim's house, where his wife and three children desperately await the husband's return. The captive from the other side of the border finds himself in exactly the same situation - he, too, has three children, he finds it hard to scrape a living together, he has never done anything to harm anyone and, like Kerim, he just wants to go back home. But life in Karabakh is far more complex now. Blood calls for blood.

In 1989, Yavar, who was serving a sentence in one of the remote prisons of the Soviet Union, returned to his native land, Karabakh - to the village of Yukhari Veysalli in the Fuzuli region. But everything has changed here, and the massacre of peaceful Azerbaijanis by Armenian militants has resulted in the deployment of Soviet peacekeepers in the region. Moreover, there is no news of Garatel, whom Yavar has loved for years and whom he was preparing to marry. Yavar, who takes on the defense of Yukhari Veysalli and the surrounding villages, gathers fighters around him. But when he comes face to face with Alexander Rokhlin, who leads the Soviet peacekeepers, he is astonished and is faced with a choice.

The film tells the story of two blind men who stand on the side of a road between oil wells and beg, and the conflict between them. The young blind man, who was born blind, sees the old blind man, who later lost his sight, as his rival. Each blind man represents a large crowd in himself.