As he avidly reads on film history and worries about his assignment to a remote and underdeveloped province, his world is invaded by phantasms of Mongol soldiers from the script of her unfinished dissertation. The “Mongols” of the film (who, as the opening scene reveals, are in fact nonactors recruited from ethnic Turkmens from the northeast of Iran), both spectral and documentary-like, make their first appearance in the present time at an excavation site, a ruin.