On 19 July 1979 the Sandinistas overthrew dictator Anastasio Somoza, and a young generation set out to build a new Nicaragua. Director Petra Hoffmann, who was in the country during that period, revisits the story through the West Germans who traveled there to help, some 15,000 of them, working in brigades that harvested coffee and cotton and built schools and clinics. The film tracks the civil war that followed, as US-backed Contra forces killed 50,000 Nicaraguans and kidnapped and killed German volunteers, then jumps to April 2018, when paramilitaries shot dead more than 400 students protesting the man who once led the revolution, Daniel Ortega, now president. Interviews with former brigade members, some of whom spent decades raising money for Nicaraguan projects, show them fleeing the country or staying silent out of fear. The film uses archival footage from the 1980s alongside present-day testimony to trace how a revolution meant to build a new society ended in the kind of repression it once fought against.