The film has a broken meaning, the last time he was a proofreader for a book publisher, he is now unemployed. Ever since he was a child, he has always been the one who pulls the short one, and he takes the wrong one. At the beginning of the film, he finds himself in such a "bunbak" situation again, and then he decides to become a professional bunbak...
At a dusty crossroads in the Soviet Union villagers surrender their possessions - a horse, a samovar, a goat - to the state. The train which takes them away brings to the village a physically and mentally handicapped woman, barely able to speak. She makes herself bracelets of burrs and studies herself in a cracked and cloudy mirror. Befriended by very few, teased and tormented by many she seeks protection at a huge portrait of Stalin.
After her husband's death, Hanna Szendroy, the former primadonna, is caught in the claws of the real estate mafia. She looses her lavish home and ends up homeless at the Keleti train station. When she returns to her house, now full of homeless people moved in by the real estate mafia, an unexpected relationship brings hope into her life again.
