Kirkenes sits 400 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle, a town of 3,500 people that also happens to be where NATO meets Russia along a 200-kilometer border. The film follows two 19-year-old recruits, David Bratland and Jesper Bruseth, through their service with the Jegerbataljonen GSV, an elite border battalion of 600 soldiers. Cameras track them through orienteering drills on skis in temperatures down to minus 30 degrees Celsius, with only a few hours of daylight, and through training on anti-aircraft and anti-tank weapons meant for a war scenario nobody wants to see happen. Alongside the military story, the film follows Yevgeny Goman, a Russian-born curator organizing the Barents Spektakel art festival on frozen Lake Förstevatne, where a giant mechanical dragon meant to anchor the opening show refuses to fly. The two threads sit side by side deliberately: soldiers guarding a frontier and an arts festival asserting a different kind of Western presence in the same remote corner of the map.