The fabulous story of the girl Hannah and the young man from the depths of the sea in the film is intertwined with the pictures of the life of a provincial German town during World War II that arise in the heroine's memory, about her first love.

A free film adaptation of the director's memoirs. In form, this is the "stream of consciousness" that attracted Sergei Eisenstein after getting acquainted with the experiments of James Joyce. The outer outline of the film is a long foreign trip of the director, which began in 1929, during which he recalls his past life and considers creative ideas. The film is constructed as a free alternation of reality, dreams, and fantasies. The material for it is fragments from the films of Sergei Eisenstein and his fellow contemporaries, documentary footage depicting the director and his time. The wide coverage of the faces and events reflected in the film shows the special role of Sergei Eisenstein in the culture of the twentieth century…