The new film by Angelopoulos is not so much a sequel to The Travelling Players, as a similar formal dramatization of the years 1949 to 1976 in Greece.

On New Year's Eve, 1976, a hunting party in Northern Greece finds a body in the snow It is perfectly preserved, although the young man was a partisan, killed in the Civil War almost twenty years before. The body is brought to a hotel and the police are called.

Angelopoulos used the inquest, during which each member of the party makes a statement to the police, as a means to re-create, in mythical and poetic forms, the history of the years following the war.

The colonel, the businessman, the editor, the politician, the building contractor, and their wives, all recall specific events and their effect on their lives In turn, each member of the group becomes the centre of his own complete story, acting out each confrontation, election or coup d'etat

As in The Travelling Players, Angelopoulos is less interested in a chronological account of modern Greek history, than in the impact of certain events on the Greek people themselves and from the many-faceted scenes contrasting the past and the present emerges the story of the post-war betrayal of the working class and the ideas of democracy.