A seedy writer of sleazy pulp novels is recruited by a quirky, reclusive ex-actor to help him write his biography at his house in Malta.

Ukrainian bishop Kiril Lakota, a political prisoner in a Soviet gulag for twenty years, is unexpectedly released and sent to the Vatican, where, upon the sudden death of the Pope, leader of the Catholic Church, he must face a challenging destiny that will put the future of the entire world in his hands.

Deranged after a fall from a horse, a man has lived for twenty years in a castle laboring under the delusion that he is Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV. His psychiatrist concocts an elaborate scheme to shock him out of his medieval reverie.