A bus driver on a regular route in the 'polder' moves into a new house with his wife. They are the first inhabitants of a new estate. At the same time, a homeless man and an woman movie into the driver's bus.

Passagiers

Orazbaz, who lives in Uzbek, longs to leave his tiny fishing village. He becomes a stowaway on a ship thinking that he will end up in Manhattan. Instead he ends up in Rotterdam and is taken in by a lonely woman, but he is eventually betrayed by her jealous husband.

The Stowaway

The Russian/Dutch painter Tatyana Yassievich divides her time between St. Petersburg, Amsterdam and Berlin. Director Van Lieshout follows her in these three cities, while she takes pictures and makes notes of everyday public spaces: train stations, blocks of flats, canteens. Subsequently, she paints them in a realistic, yet simplified style and without any people, like stage scenery for the stories that are played out on those locations. 'I don't paint the people themselves, only the public places they pass through in their thousands.' Yassievich works in her studio, sets up an exhibition and tells in voice-over about her work and her ties with the three cities, and particularly about the changes that took place in St. Petersburg after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Between times, the documentary shows the sort of urban landscapes that Yassievich paints, in fixed frames, like moving pictures.

Petersburg, Places and Paintings

An introverted young poet struggles with a writer's block and meets a mysterious girl, who reminds him of Monica Vitti.

The Muse

Filmmaker Ben van Lieshout was inspired by the work from Sergei Prokoedin-Gorski (1863-1944), inventor of the color photography in Russia.