Dutch photographer Rob Hornstra spends years photographing the North Caucasus and Sochi region ahead of the 2014 Winter Olympics, working under what he calls "slow journalism," a deliberate rejection of the fast, headline-driven pace of most photojournalism. The film follows him into towns and villages near the Olympic construction sites, showing the sanatoriums, war-scarred landscapes, and ordinary residents that rarely make it into coverage of the Games themselves. Interviews with Hornstra lay out his method: returning to the same places repeatedly, building trust with subjects over months rather than days, and treating the run-up to a global media event as a story in its own right. The footage contrasts the optimism of Olympic promotion with the slower, harder realities of a region still marked by conflict, including nearby Abkhazia and Chechnya. What emerges is less a preview of a sporting event than a record of a place before the cameras and construction crews move on and the world's attention moves elsewhere.