In a devastated and violent scene, in which various television screens repeatedly transmit fragments of war news, there unfold various historical and literary episodes in which the characters, for the most part anonymous, are unknowing and involuntary victims of war and its destructive psychological effects. In this way there intersect scenes from ancient Rome, the civil wars in the Balkans, the Franco-Prussian War, Japan after its surrender in the Second World War and brief news flashes from the present. The effect is to bring the past into a dimension of dramatic awareness of the present.