In this film, which inaugurated the New Bulgarian Cinema, director Ranghel Vulchanov (The Unknown Soldier's Patent Leather Shoes, October 8) broke with the Moscow Film School tradition of his predecessors to introduce “true poetry and passion into the...Bulgarian Film, and above all freely employed the immense vocabulary of film language, much of which surpassed the discoveries of the latter ‘new wave'.... The story of the film takes place in 1925 on a deserted island in the Black Sea where several participants in the unsuccessful 1923 uprising are held prisoner. They plan their escape.... The theme was novel primarily in its romantically individualized approach to the characters, who were seen from many viewpoints, including an ironical one. For the first time, Kolarov's camera explored the rawness of reality without the artificiality of the studio....” (Liehm & Liehm, The Most Important Art)