Rejected by Hollywood and facing pressure to return to Stalinist Russia, filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein travels to Mexico to shoot a new film. Chaperoned by his guide Palomino, he experiences the ties between Eros and Thanatos, happy to create their effects in cinema, troubled to suffer them in life.
A struggling mine owner supplies his workers with drugs so they'll forget a tough existence. Nearby a small community of reindeer breeders also struggles.This critique of capitalism unfolds against a Western like Lapland landscape.