Framed by his personal recollections of growing up with the Cold War and the Berlin Wall, filmmaker Ross McElwee documents a cautious farewell to Checkpoint Charlie. The film portrays one neighborhood in the American sector of Berlin during two contrastive time frames: 1986, when the Wall was very much intact, and then again in 1989, when the Wall and the Cold War were suddenly in the midst of being dismantled. In this simply made cinema verité–style film, McElwee and co-director Marilyn Levine successfully point out that while history recounts the acts of statesmen and great events, it is also about everyday people and the impact those events have on their lives.