London 1979 - Thatcher, strikes, recession. Nineteen-year-old Maria leaves Holland for London to enroll in a course at Fiona Bramling’s College of Speech and Drama. She rents a room with meddlesome Mrs. Bodley, writing lonely letters at night to her Dutch boyfriend, Felix. At the college she enjoys success of a kind, with comical character improvisations. Her ambitions have a wider compass, however – to be engaged in sincere and profound explorations of worlds where life and theatre meet.

Through photography she becomes acquainted with a different world of art, tougher, but more authentic, she feels: young British artists and musicians (at the zenith of punk and new wave). In a world where life and art intermingle, and the performance is hard to distinguish from the real, friendship and truth appear to be ephemeral, and appearance can never be taken for granted. Thirty years later Maria comes across a photograph that Faye Finsbury had secretly taken of her, and chilling memories, long stowed away, come to the surface again. Recollections of a year that nearly killed her, and of a time that determined the rest of her life.

'Subtle portrait of Maria and her unremitting descent from ‘naive and high-minded girl’ to someone who sleeps in cardboard boxes in an empty factory.' - Het Parool

'Haveman strikes all the right chords as she describes the confused mind of a person who has lost her way.' - Nederlands Dagblad