In the final days of WWII, a seventeen-year-old boy wanders the countryside. He is captured by Soviet troops, then released, then captured once more - after he has donned a German uniform for warmth - and imprisoned at a remote barracks, where he strikes up an unlikely friendship with a young Russian soldier. His attempts to return home form the crux of this wonderfully lyrical film, which displays all of the director's consistent themes: the psychological presence of landscape, the randomness of violence, the arbitrary nature of power.