A story of a naive man, whose direct behavior stirs in people moral unrest, rage and embarrassment over their own pettiness, making them yearn for goodness.

After surviving a deadly attack, a guard on the Soviet-Chinese border decides to become a monk but must continually prove along the way that he's capable of becoming the enlightened man he set out to be.

In a poor Estonian village, a group of peasants use magic and folk remedies to survive the winter, and a young woman tries to get a young man to love her.