Greece becomes the sharpest test case for Europe's austerity politics, and journalist Rageh Omaar travels to Athens to find out why. He follows the country's long habit of strikes and demonstrations, which regular Greeks describe as almost ritualized: workers march on the national parliament, rocks get thrown, police answer with tear gas, and everyone goes home. That pattern breaks on May 5, 2010, when lawmakers debate the depth of the coming cuts and protesters storm the parliament building, setting fires that kill three people. It is the worst unrest since the fall of the military dictatorship thirty-five years earlier. Omaar talks to the workers facing pay cuts and rising unemployment, and to officials trying to justify the austerity program, tracing the anger back to its sources rather than treating the riot as an isolated event. The film stays close to the streets of Athens, using the fire at parliament as the hinge between decades of routine protest and something with real casualties.