In December 2021, the body of an Englishman, Stanley Powton, is found in a self-built tent in a park on the outskirts of Amsterdam. Through the foundation The Lonely Funeral, a Dutch initiative where poets accompany funerals of the unclaimed with a poem, his son Marcus is informed just in time to attend the burial. It is only the second time Marcus encounters his father. The first was briefly, as a newborn.
Years earlier, Marcus tried to trace his father through official channels and public appeals, following scattered leads that never resulted in a meeting. After Stanley’s death, making the film becomes a stimulus for Marcus to get to know his father posthumously - a way to continue a search that had failed in life.
Together with the filmmaker, Marcus returns to the place where his father lived and died. The tent has been removed by the authorities. What remains lies scattered on the ground, between leaves and sand: nails hammered into a branch, a plastic flower. Remnants of a life lived in refusal of institutions. Marcus carefully gathers and presents them as if they were treasures. Everything is covered in a thin layer of mold.
As Marcus retraces his father’s path, identification deepens. The father’s radical withdrawal from society becomes a seductive counter-image to Marcus’ own life, increasingly shaped by systems he no longer trusts. Drawn to male voices that promise control, empowerment and self-mastery, Marcus pulls the film closer to himself, wanting to grant its protagonist a good ending.
What begins as a search for a missing father gradually shifts toward Marcus himself and his growing desire to step outside the system, believing that true freedom may lie in leaving the Netherlands behind and starting over somewhere else, on his own terms.