Vytautas Taukinaitis

Arūnas, an 18 year old high-school graduate from the port town, is going through a crisis. He is stressed by the school routine. At home, his father bores Arūnas with his constant recollections about fighting in an antifascist guerrilla squad, while his mother unexpectedly turns back to her old dream of becoming an artist and decides to leave the house, taking her younger son Saulius with her. His father ends up in hospital, because of a grenade fragment lodged in his spine since the war. Arūnas is surrounded by the betrayal of friends.

The film is based on the novel of the same name by P. Kuusberg and tells about the fate of former classmates, high school students, during the Second World War and in the post-war period.

The peasant Juras Tarutis takes part in the struggle for independent Lithuania and in the election campaign for the Sejm, painfully experiencing the fascist coup in 1926. At first, he firmly believes in land reform and only after difficult trials, he become disillusioned with the reform and with the bourgeois system itself.