Two people, a Frenchman Julien Maroyeur and a Jewish German woman (Anna Kupfer) met on a train while escaping the German army entering France.

The reunion of a group of former medical students results in a flood of bitter memories.

Beautifully shot in black and white, and scripted by Tarkovsky's collaborator Andrei Konchalovsky, this powerful melodrama tells the story of a young boy who undertakes the perilous journey to Uzbekistan's capital Tashkent, to earn some money for his hungry family. Filming in the periphery of the Soviet Union, in a time of relative political relaxation, director Shukhrat Abbasov actually dared to depict the poverty and famine that resulted from the Bolshevik Revolution.