Six characters – contemporary archetypes of urban solitude – meet in an old apartment located in the city center of Barcelona. An elderly married couple, her brother and three tenants: a blonde woman who gives French classes, a young security guard, ex-football player and a young, pregnant South American girl. The old man, who was formerly a doorman at the opera and who likes to dress up in women’s clothes, gets them all together and asks them to leave as he is going to die and wants to be alone for the last stage of his life.

At the end of the Spanish civil war, Fando, a boy of about ten, tries to make sense of war and his father's arrest. His mother is religious, sympathetic to the Fascists; his father is accused of being a Red. Fando discovers that his mother may have aided in his father's arrest. Sometimes we witness Fando imagining explanations for what's going on; sometimes we see him at play, alone or with his friend Thérèse. Oedipal fantasies and a lad's natural curiosity about sex and death mix with his search for his mother's nature and his father's fate. Will Fando survive the search?