Set in 1989 at the end of the Communist era even as the Berlin Wall was falling, a humble train dispatcher who's lived all his life in a small hamlet on the Czech side of the Czech-Polish border has been tormented by disturbing dreams about what happened to his ethnic German babysitter at the end of WW II. At the same time, a strange man of few to no words (is he mute?) in his mid 40s, shows up in the small hamlet with an old photograph and an ax. Much ensues...