The story about colonization of poor Dalmatian peasants to the fertile Pannonian plain shortly after WWII.

A story of two people who fell in love and couldn't find their way in the big city: a man who came from the countryside to work in a steel factory and a woman who works in the factory restaurant.

Lado Tajovic, a student, is charged by the communist party to go to his home in the Montenegrin Mountains, to illegally spread the liberation movement's propaganda. Alone, surrounded by enemies, always awake and ready to evade traps and ambushes, Lado fights on the verge of sleep, against people which are cowards ready to betrayal. He fights his own temptations, hallucinations that constantly besiege him. Although he perseveres in holding to party directives: no killing and no revenge, Lado at one moment of weakness falls to a primal human act vengeance.

A returnee finds disapproval in his hometown he once left.