By the early 1970s, Portugal had lived under Europe's longest-running dictatorship for nearly five decades, a regime built by António de Oliveira Salazar and continued by Marcelo Caetano. This film follows the group of junior military officers, exhausted by a losing colonial war in Africa, who quietly planned a coup rather than a mutiny within the ranks. On the night of April 24, 1974, a coded song played on the radio signaled troops to move on Lisbon, and by the next morning the regime had collapsed with almost no bloodshed, as citizens greeted soldiers by placing carnations in their rifle barrels. Archival footage and interviews trace the plot from its secret planning sessions through the tense hours when the outcome was still uncertain, and into the political chaos and hope that followed. Built like a thriller rather than a lecture, the film treats the coup's mechanics, the radio codes, troop movements, and split-second decisions, as seriously as its historical consequences.