Comrade Zylo, the head of Albania’s top censorship institution in the 1970s, is a tyrannical bureaucrat. He orders the talented writer Demka to compose an ideological speech. Demka sees that he has become a slave of a Machiavellian propaganda master. But that’s not his deepest problem: Demka realises that he is falling in love with Zylo’s wife, Adila.