A pessimistic urban drama, with a musical score by Jack Sels and Max Damasse, charts in strongly expressionistically lit black-and-white images the wanderings of a tormented man through the cosmopolitan port city of Antwerp. The only people to show him understanding are an orphan and two disillusioned women.

This historical costume drama is a mini-series on the life of Flemish first-rate Baroque painter Pieter Pauwel Rubens (1577-1640), whose artistic success throughout Europe not only made him a fortune allowing him to stock his Antwerp residence ('Rubenshuis' in Dutch) and a castle at Elewijt, in the countryside nearer Brussels, with numerous fashionable treasures, but also became an ennobled diplomat for the Spanish Hapsburg rulers of the Southern Low Countries (now Belgium), who often traveled, for painting commissions and/or diplomatic missions, to and worked in Italy, France, Spain, all Catholic powers, as well as protestant England and the United Provinces (mainly Holland), also allowing him to meet other prominent contemporaries such as artists. It further covers his marriages to Isabella Brandt and Hélène Fourment.

A Lonely Man Falls in Love With an English Woman He Meets on His Way to Work in Hillbrow