Modris is 17. He lives in a concrete housing project on the outskirts of Riga. Modris spends his days doing the same thing as most of his friends. After school, he either embellishes the grey buildings with colourful graffiti, or he hangs out with his girlfriend. Modris also spends a lot of time in the thrall of the slot machines in the local pub, pushing one coin after the next into the seductively flashing one-arm bandits. When nobody will lend him any more money for his gambling hobby, he even pawns his mother’s electric heater – in the dead of the chilly Latvian winter. His mother is beside herself. She is determined that her son will not end up like his father, who is in prison. So she reports him to the police. After Modris is sentenced to probation, he starts to search for the father he’s never met. Along the way he increasingly surrenders to a fate that he realizes too late does not have to be his own.