In the Transylvanian Alps, a woodcutter and his wife fall prey to the official forester, greedy for the wife as well as the land, in this extraordinary film that locates anticapitalism in a lyrical paean to nature and its balancing forces. After the woodsman takes his revenge on the landowners, the willingness of the shepherds to share his punishment is a moment in cinema that speaks volumes. People of the Mountains was ahead of its time, both for the realism of its authentic setting amid the peasantry, and for its modern narrative techniques where image and inference convey story, and unemotional dialogue lends power to the plight of its speakers. This film by a young director won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival but riled wartime and postwar authorities. Hungarian film historian István Nemerskurty calls it "the most outstanding Hungarian film made before the Liberation...not a fruit of wartime film production (but) rather a defiance."