Essentially true story of how Spartan king Leonidas led an extremely small army of Greek Soldiers (300 of his personal body guards from Sparta) to hold off an invading Persian army now thought to have numbered 250,000.
During the Greek summer in the war year of 1944, a German military unit sets up camp on the plateau of Thebes. Armed with a 16 mm camera, the captain of the unit, a former professor for classical Greek philology, comes up with the idea to film the myth of Oedipus.
Thanasis, a family breadwinner who has been working for 17 years at the Ministry of Measure and Station without any promotion, is trying to cover his expenses by doing a second job. When he learns that he can not be promoted because he does not own a high school diploma, he decides to go back to school.
The mute wife (Olia Lazaridou) of a shadow-theater player (Antonis Kafetzopoulos) is suffering from cancer. An old woman, guided by her visions, discovers a Byzantine religious icon buried in a field. Her nephew sells the find to a thief, who then murders the old woman, without knowing that she had told the village priest about the holy icon she found. Two priests arrive in the village together with the puppeteer and his ailing wife, and there the wife sees a vision of the icon and where it was located in the field, which leads to the discovery of the bones of a saint. The wife sleeps on the spot where the holy relics were discovered and, upon awaking the following morning, regains her speech.
A group of resistance fighters during the Occupation, collaborates with a lieutenant who comes to Greece from the headquarters of the Middle East, aiming to blow up a German ship.
Something changes in the relationship of Achilleas and Anna when she starts to dream vividly and insists on relating her dreams to her husband. He is a barrister in the middle of an important murder trial and his temper becomes frayed with Anna's seeming indifference and involvement and preoccupation with her dream world.