Countries the film is shot in include the Netherlands, Switzerland, England, Yugoslavia, France, Canada, West Germany, the United States, India, and Spain.

As the film opens, a ninety-year-old Louis van Gasteren—a documentary filmmaker and artist famed in the Netherlands—is seated in a video editing suite, watching scenes of himself in the 1960s, a time when "anything was possible."

Van Gasteren is touring a carnival with his second wife, Jacqueline, their baby girl Mardou, and two older children from his first marriage.

The family rides the carousel and sees the sights, including a "Fat Lady" exhibit of a mother and daughter weighing 900 pounds.

His father, Louis van Gasteren, Sr., was a famous actor, and his mother, Elise Menagé Challa, was a singer who gave up the concert stage to promote Communism and traveled rural Spain to learn the songs of the peasants.

The film takes a turn of style as Van Gasteren begins to act, playing himself as a good-timer who cheats on his wife with casual encounters.

Shortly afterward, it is reported that a young American has died from jumping out a window while tripping on LSD, apparently believing he could fly like a bird.

Troubled by this, Louis travels to a U.S. military base in Germany to talk to the boy's parents, as well as to Millbrook, New York, to meet the LSD-advocate Timothy Leary.

In the two skillfully interwoven interviews, a flower-bedecked Leary boasts that people come to his estate to find God through LSD, while the grieving parents puzzle over what went wrong with their son, who had been so healthy and virtuous.

Interspersed with shots of his enchanting baby daughter as she takes her first steps and grows into childhood, Van Gasteren turns his attention to his art, to meeting artists, intellectuals, and scientists of the ’60s in the United States and Canada, and puts on several exhibits of his own photography and sculpture.

At last Louis travels to the Spanish seaside and seems to resolve the loss of his mother by rescuing a man-sized living turtle being sold at market.

The camera shifts to a café in which a flamenco singer improvises for the family a touching tribute to Mardou, "a little angel of God."

In his editing room at ninety years old, Louis van Gasteren at last reveals the heart-breaking event that blocked him from completing the film in the ensuing decades.

The credits roll over a shot of Louis in the 1960s gazing out the window of a train, where he first began to ponder the word "nema," as "Really and Sincerely" by the Bee Gees plays.

Additional cameramen during the very long shooting period included Milek Knebel, Theo Hogers, Roeland Kerbosch, Olof Smit, Bert Spijkerman, Louis van Gasteren, and Kester Dixon (for final filming in 2012).

[citation needed] Van Gasteren worked hard to get an interview with Meher Baba for Nema aviona za Zagreb.

[8] Van Gasteren told Baba, "The appearance of the Avatar in my film is more than functional, it is necessary, to give all the other happenings and sequences the final and right dimension.