After moving with his parents to post-war Kraków, young Ludwik begins studies at one of the city’s prestigious high schools. Amid the ruins of a nation rebuilding, he navigates first love, sexual awakenings, and the turbulent emotions of adolescence. Drawn to his older friend Marek, a hero of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, Ludwik struggles between emulating his idol and rebelling against the injustices and hypocrisies of the new social order. His coming of age becomes inseparable from the political and moral challenges of Poland in 1947.