It is the 20th of December, 1989, and Ceausescu's regime is on its last legs. The army violently suppresses an uprising in Timisoara, but any news that reaches Bucharest is scant and sanitized. Six people find themselves in the eye of the storm without realizing it. A TV director has to find a way to save his New Year's show after the key actress defects. The solution lies with a distressed theatre actress who can't reach her ex-boyfriend in Timisoara. Meanwhile the director's son, a student, plans to flee to Yugoslavia by swimming across the Danube. Watching the son is an officer of the Securitate secret police, who struggles to move his mother from her soon-to-be-demolished house to a new apartment she cannot stand. The move is being executed by a factory worker, who panics after his son writes a letter to Santa Claus that reveals his father wants Ceausescu dead. All these lives, under constant and invisible surveillance by the Securitate, converge in a tragicomedy that climaxes with the bang of a firecracker in an highly unlikely pair of hands, effectively kicking off the revolution.