Winter in Rimouski, Quebec. A young German scientist, Teresa, rents a room in an apartment she shares with Nicole – single mother, a mature student in sociology and the owner of an Internet sex shop for women.
Teresa came to Canada to research how the shape of snowflakes reflects the conditions of their formation. She doesn’t talk much. Nicole is kind and attentive to Teresa’s needs, but she does so many things Teresa can’t approve or understand!
One day a Native American called Gaston comes to Teresa’s apartment to install a cable service for her. A radical socialist and a union leader, Gaston is fascinated by the fact that Teresa comes from Dresden – from the former East Germany. He takes upon himself to protect Teresa from the ‘cruel capitalist society’ and tunes her reception box so that she can watch, free of charge, ‘any satellite transmission available on Earth’. He is infatuated with Teresa, but his attempts at ‘approchement’ are hampered by mutual misunderstanding and Teresa’s fear of physical contact.
Disturbed by Gaston’s attention and Nicole’s in-house demonstrations of merchandise, Teresa withdraws to her room, where, accidentally switching on the Gaston-tuned television, she stumbles over a live broadcast from a Russian Space Station, showing a smiling young cosmonaut (Ivan).
Intrigued by the unusual shape of an artificial dendrite crystal demonstrated by Ivan and grown on board of the station, Teresa shares the drawing she makes of the crystal with her colleagues from the research centre. Wanting to find more data about the experiment, she discovers, to her surprise, that the Station is declared empty, and the last cosmonaut who was on-board died in an accident during the landing.
From a newspaper article Teresa learns the name of the cosmonaut, whose picture leaves no doubts that it is the same person she saw in the broadcast.
The date of the planned destruction of the Space Station is announced, but the live broadcasts from space continue. Teresa comes to the conclusion that the cosmonaut is still alive, doomed to remain on the station – and to perish along with it. Teresa is the only person who can save him now… Or can she? She tapes the next broadcast and sets off on a trip to Ottawa to contact the government. Her evidence is dismissed: both the post-Soviet authorities and NASA claim that what Teresa sees is in fact old recorded communications sessions being broadcast for training purposes. Unconvinced by official assertions and desperate to save Ivan, Teresa contacts tabloid newspapers and invites a journalist to watch the broadcast. Unfortunately, the transmission is now unrecognisably scrambled and the journalist leaves certain that Teresa is suffering from a winter-caused neurosis.
With the help of Gaston, who decodes the scrambled broadcast, Teresa is able to transcribe the last transmission announcing the next-day de-orbiting of the Station. All she can do now, is to fly to a remote location in the Labrador Sea, accompanied by Gaston and his friend, a Native agricultural pilot, to watch the explosion of the Station disintegrating over the white emptiness of the frozen waters, a giant shooting star.