The German title translates literally as “In the Course of Time,” and time—its passing and the changes it wreaks—is an almost palpable part of the film's subject. Set thirty years after the war, the narrative focuses on two thirty-year-old characters who travel the East German border, moving via a series of disquieting, disconnected and unsatisfactory encounters to the realization that “everything must change.” Kings of the Road is a marathon road movie: about the death of the cinema; about the absence of women; about the fact that, as one character puts it, "the Americans have colonized our subconscious."