It tells the story of Paul Sweetman, a shy, overweight Jewish boy who is damned with almost perfect recall, growing up in Johannesburg in the 1960s and 1970s. Conscripted into the army, he is forced to witness an atrocity committed by South African soldiers on the Angolan border. In a harrowing scene Paul fails to intervene to save a black child whom his fellow soldiers are terrorising. To unburden himself, Paul appears before the TRC but his version of the events is called into question and the outcome is inconclusive. So is Paul's own view of the commission and of everything else. In the final scene Paul consults a sangoma about the future. "You will just have to wait and see," she answers. "You and everybody else."