An aspiring film student is denied a scholarship to the state-funded university when his father is thrown in jail. The man had stopped a train in order to facilitate the union between two old friends. The son then takes a job as a land surveyor and meets a Greek man who works towards the collective benefits of the peasants. The man is killed in a peasant uprising prompted by a bureaucratic boondoggle. The surveyor looks after the man's widow as his emerging political and social awareness leads him take a stand against government injustice. Another incident, in which gypsies are rounded up by state hygiene workers, further galvanizes the man's beliefs. He photographs the incident, and his work allows him to be accepted into the school from which he was previously denied admission.
The changing and turbulent history of Hungary is seen through the eyes of three men over a 30-year period in this somber drama. The three recall the highlights of their lives in flashbacks as they reminisce in the mid 1960s. The venerable trio begin their story in the 1930s, through World War II, and the decade beyond the communist invasion of 1956.
The film tells the story of a regiment of Hungarian hussars stationed in Poland. The hussars, mostly ordinary men, have heard news of the uprising and wish to return to the homeland to defend the newly independent country. The Empire, on the other hand, is firmly resolved that all Hungarian troops in the imperial army should be kept as far away from the trouble spot as possible, knowing that most soldiers would be loyal to Budapest rather than Vienna.
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A documentary about the Gulag
