Žanis Lipke, an ordinary blue-collar worker in Latvia, embarks on a covert operation. Despite his family’s hardship under successive Soviet and German occupations, Lipke tries to save local Jews from Nazi persecution and certain death, moving them from the Riga ghetto to an underground bunker hidden on his property.

Two young boys are forced to escape their native city of Riga. Later these same boys turn out to be among the most extraordinary personalities of the previous century: one becomes a leading commie film director and the other a mentor to the entire British Empire. This story will reveal the secrets of the remarkably parallel lives between Sergei Eisenstein and Isaiah Berlin.