With his father's painting as his guide, Joseph visits historians, archivists, architects, and artists who conjure Vienna's passion for homemaking—the apartments, bars, galleries, and sanatoria that are the triumphs of modern interior design.

He enters interiors created by Otto Wagner, Gustav Klimt, Josef Hoffmann, Adolf Loos, Sigmund Freud and others that bring to light dark recesses of the soul.

Joseph also enters the workshop of a master shoemaker, heir to an establishment boasting the "imperial and royal" Habsburg patent that made shoes for the nobility.

The present shoemaker's family history is one of multi-generational belonging to Vienna, though haunted by the past, including fate of a Jewish tailor in the same building.

Completed eighty years after the Anschluss, the film unfolds through thirteen chapters, called "Stellen" (German for "stations"), that move through Vienna's urban and psychic interior to a buried past, when dreams of home became, for a city's most ardent homemakers, an unimaginable nightmare.

The word "Stellen" references Otto Wagner's theory of infrastructural transit nodes that characterize belonging in the modern metropolis as necessarily in motion.

The film's interviews are set in representative interiors that are simultaneously closed off from the city and invaded by movement in the form of subterranean waters, subways, tunnels, back entrances, etc.

Wagner's Stadtbahn carries Joseph to the exposed bed of the Wien (river) where he encounters water ecologist Stefan Schmutz releasing baby sturgeons.

Speaking before Klimt's Beethoven Frieze, artist and theorist Peter Weibel explains Freud's theory of the Uncanny, where home is familiar and strange, built architecture and psychic space.

To the sound of a late 1920s recording of an old-fashioned aria from Erich Wolfgang Korngold's "Die tote Stadt," a montage of photographs taken by his father in Vienna in 1946 gives way to a full view of the painting and the lost home it depicts.

Children replace the bather and his memories, the Danube is shown flowing from the Prater Spitz eastward into Hungary, and a closing aerial shot glimpses Vienna coming into view again from the west, with the voice of Adam Phillips reflecting on secret spaces of home.

The story involves the waking situation of a child’s corpse accidentally catching on fire while the exhausted father, asleep in a room next door, dreams the child stands by his bed, catches him by the arm, “and whisper[s] reproachfully, ‘Father, don’t you see I’m burning.’” [4] In the film, Freud's words (unidentified) are read in voiceover by Adam Phillips, first, in part, as the title sequence of the film, then, in full, after the interview with survivor Edith Brickell.

Set implicitly in a Jewish home, the dream story concerns relations between sleep and waking life, and between generations divided by trauma.