Documentary film narrative about a railway connection destroyed during the war and now situated in the Soviet zone. Despite all the official hurdles, apprentices and young workers manage to build the bridge on schedule.

Vienna, 1956. Viennese butcher Karl Bockerer goes to Hungary to buy meat. Along with his foster son and grandchild, he is caught up in the turmoil of the Hungarian revolt against the Soviet occupiers. With some luck and a great deal of cunning, Bockerer and his family manage to escape, but the Austrian border is closed - except for the bridge to Andau...

In March of 1945, as the War in Europe is coming to a close, fighting erupts between German and American troops at the last remaining bridgehead across the Rhine.

Mina is a movie buff with a husband, Georges, who's out of work, and a 15-year-old son, Tommy. While Mina works part-time as a domestic for Claire Daboval, the family is terribly short on money, so when Georges is offered construction work on a massive bridge project, he immediately accepts, even though the job site is far away. One day, while taking in a matinee screening of West Side Story, Mina meets a man named Matthias, an engineer associated with the bridge project. It's love at first sight for the both of them, and while Mina has no desire to hurt Georges, who is a good and decent man, she has found another good and decent man whom she loves even more. Tommy, on the other hand, has to deal with this crisis in his parents' marriage while he's sorting out his own infatuation with Ms. Daboval's daughter, Lisbeth.

The story of Operation Market Garden—a failed attempt by the allies in the latter stages of WWII to end the war quickly by securing three bridges in Holland allowing access over the Rhine into Germany. A combination of poor allied intelligence and the presence of two crack German panzer divisions meant that the final part of this operation (the bridge in Arnhem over the Rhine) was doomed to failure.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey is American author Thornton Wilder's second novel, first published in 1927 to worldwide acclaim. It tells the story of several interrelated people who die in the collapse of an Inca rope-fiber suspension bridge in Peru, and the events that lead up to their being on the bridge. A friar who has witnessed the tragic accident then goes about inquiring into the lives of the victims, seeking some sort of cosmic answer to the question of why each had to die.