The actor Lucas Bron performs the play King Lear by William Shakespeare for the pupils of his son Patja. After the show, Patja has already got home when he is warned that his father's house is on fire. He rushes to the fateful spot. The fire brigade has already arrived and is unable to say whether his father is still in the house. Patja desperately runs into the burning house and finds his father unconscious on the kitchen floor. But Lucas' spirit is in the theatre. In a magic train of thought, just before he dies, Lucas directs and acts, assisted by his son, high points and low from his eventful life in the theatre, but also outside. Theatre and reality become intertwined. It slowly becomes clear that Lucas still has something to tell his son.

A widowed Latvian father's quest for a much-loved Dutch pen pal, whom he hasn't heard from in three decades, provides the basis of this comedy-drama. The father is accompanied by his traumatized and mute eight-year-old son whom he had to kidnap from a Riga hospital. Together, the two flee towards Holland where the father Yuris hopes to find his long-lost friend Marie, whom he remembers as a great beauty. During the long journey, father and son have several funny adventures, many of which occur because neither father nor son speak much Dutch. They finally arrive at Marie's door empty-handed. What they find, gives them little hope, for the lithe young idealist of Yuris' dreams has become middle-aged and cynical.