Ruth Beckermann revisits the amorous correspondence between two of the most important postwar German-language poets, Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan. Disarmingly naked, filled with unrestrained avowals of lovesickness, envy, vulnerability, professional jealousy, and regret, the letters chronicle an impossible love haunted not only by social complexities, but political and historical ones. Seizing upon the beauty and passion of the prose, Beckermann's film also poignantly evokes the transformations wrought upon it by time and transference as it recreates the writers' dreamy, decades-old dance of desire through the voices and bodies of two wise young actors in the present.