The film takes place in Bulgaria by the Rhodope Mountains, near the Turkish border. A widower, Mityo, needs money to forestall foreclosure on his home. He drives a milk tanker but business is slow, so he reluctantly accepts a job smuggling migrants over the border into Bulgaria. (A character in the film describes the migrants as Gypsies, Arabs, and blacks; many of them are presumably Refugees of the Syrian Civil War.) The work reminds Mityo of his military service in the late 1980s, assigned to the Bulgarian border guard, where his task was to prevent citizens from leaving the Eastern Bloc.