In the waning days of World War II, an assortment of women, children and elderly men struggle to survive in Berlin, cast out of their formerly middle-class lives.
After having been raped by a number of Soviet soldiers, the film's anonymous woman, a German journalist (Nina Hoss) petitions the battalion's commanding officer for an alliance and protection.
After initially rejecting her, the married officer Andrei Rybkin (Yevgeny Sidikhin) is gradually seduced by the beautiful but battered German woman.
"[2] The reviewer wrote that after the film portrays the initial rapes and assaults against German women by Soviet soldiers, it takes a "much more somber and morally complex turn.
It described the film as "that rarest of wartime dramas: an intimate, sorrowful glimpse into the heart and loins of the hellish aftermath of war.