It was invited to screen at the Copenhagen International Film Festival in 2006 and was released theatrically in the United Kingdom in November 2006.

Thomas (Ed Stoppard), a young German, fights unsuccessfully as one of Nazi Germany's Joy Division youth troops after the Soviet Union invades.

In the early 1960s, he loses faith in the ideals he was brought up with, and works as a spy and assassin for the Russians during the Cold War.

Years later, he falls in love with Yvonne (Michelle Gayle), while on assignment in Britain; she has no idea what he is really employed to do.

It is a non-linear story, told in a series of flashbacks to the mid-1940s and early 1960s, narrated in voice over from the film's present day setting of 1966.

When the Eastern Front collapses, the boys in Thomas's Hitler Youth unit are drafted into the Volkssturm.

Together they flee and join the mass exodus of refugees heading westwards, away from the advancing Soviet Army.

During an aerial attack they meet Karl (Thomas Darchinger), who informs them of an army evacuation transport pick-up post, which after weeks of walking they reach with other soldiers.

Seventeen years after World War II, Thomas, now played by Ed Stoppard, has himself become a Soviet soldier of officer rank.

Thomas is told that Albert Steiner, the man in the film, had become one of the KGB agents in London, but that he had defected to the British and subsequently vanished.

Thomas is sent on a mission to London in order to join Steiner's former cell and to observe the loyalty of the agents within it.

Thomas arrives in London and after making contact with his controller Tally-Ho (Bernard Kay), a British man who communicates solely over a phone line, finds a room in a lodging house run by Neville (Ram John Holder), a Jamaican man.

Thomas is instantly drawn to Yvonne, a beautiful, warm spirited and fun-loving artist of the Beat Generation, but keeps a safe distance as he focuses on his mission.

Unknown to Thomas, he is being watched by Harris (Sean Chapman), a ruthless British Secret Intelligence Service officer, with links to Steiner, and answerable to Commander Bothringaye, a senior civil servant who runs an autonomous security department.

They decide to apprehend Dennis as the supposed leader not only of the spy-cell but also of a planned coup, in collaboration with local Communist groups.

After a long and disillusioned discussion about the existence and role of low-rank spy agents, Dennis considers running away and breaking contacts as useless, as suggested by Thomas, shoots himself in the mouth.

Thomas decides that he must leave his post, as his position has become compromised in light of Stephanie's disappearance and of her inaccurate information regarding Dennis' death.

He shows her the photograph of Melanie and explains that for 17 years the photo was the only part of him that was 'real', but that now she (Yvonne) had made him feel 'real again'.

In order to persuade him to do so, they made the KGB believe he had already defected, by way of telling Stephanie and by killing Krivosheyev.

Nick Hasted wrote in The Independent, "Inspired by historical accounts that chronicle suffering within the Third Reich, cinema is starting to look compassionately at the Nazis", and, more specifically, "Reg Traviss's Joy Division, most remarkably, ignores the Holocaust, instead following a German boy soldier in 1944 through to his life as a Soviet spy in Sixties London, showing the subjective experience of German civilians as they're bombed by the British and raped by the Russians, and the savage situations its uncomprehending 14-year-old Nazi is subject to".