The insular world of a single, remote village in Orissa becomes the universe for two hours in this absorbing, revealing film. Within these confines, Manmohan Mahapatra captures the historical drama of an uprooted rural peasantry simply by setting his story at the very moment when the last landowning peasant in the village, Bhamar, struggles to keep his family plot out of the hands of the landlord Janardan, to whom all of the other villagers have been forced to mortgage their land. Now those who once tilled their own fields are Janardan's virtual slaves, and others are forced to do backbreaking labor in the nearby stone quarry. In the tale of two peasants, Bhamar and Haria, and their worries over their respective daughters of marriageable age, Mahapatra captures the ironic role of tradition in a village where, on the one hand, it seems nothing has changed for generations, and on the other, so much has been lost that poverty now fosters superstition and helplessness. But, in ignorance, hope lives on.