Piirissaar is a tiny Estonian island in Lake Peipus, on the very border of Russia. The Russian Old Believers who inhabited the island appeared here 300 years ago, during the Great Northern War, fleeing from the religious reforms in the Orthodox Church and to avoid being mobilized in the Russian army. As the waves have washed the island smaller and smaller, the community here has also fused over time, inevitably reaching the brink of extinction. However, the local culture and sense of life that developed in isolation from the rest of the "Russian world" has not yet completely disappeared from Piirissaar.

Thirty-year-old Igor, who received two higher educations, has been living illegally in the Chernobyl zone for seven years now. All he wants is to find peace and an opportunity to move away from civilization. Igor is tormented by a number of psychological problems, both personal and global. A harmonizing world, eternal emotionality and the existential mystery of human existence coexist in it at the same time. Igor is surrounded by elderly residents of the Chernobyl zone. They seem to live in an unreal Atlantis, from where even the war going on in Ukraine seems to be something unreal, taking place on another planet.

Latgale is a small area in the east of Latvia, on the very outskirts of the European Union. Sometimes it seems that this land is in the center of the reservoir. In other cases, it is represented as an ark in the desert, saving mankind, covered with sand. Not so long ago, life in this part of the Baltic region was completely different. The number of Jews in cities sometimes reached 90%. The Old Believers, having escaped persecution in Russia, built their own villages there. At present, Latgalians are distinguished by their dialect, poverty and provinciality. This land is disappearing. The way of its existence, which for centuries made this region exceptional and extraordinary, disappears.