Out of the blue, actress Anna loses her job at a small municipal theater. Having just been on stage, she now finds herself in the dreariness of the local job center. At the insistence of her theater-enthusiastic caseworker, she takes over the management of an acting course for eight long-term unemployed people who are difficult to place. Despite enormous resistance to the compulsory training program, the frustrated lone fighters increasingly form a close-knit group with whom Anna stages Antigone. Surprisingly, the participants' private dramas become more and more turbulent and Anna also experiences a new beginning that she hadn't expected.