An abstract tale of a society that exploits everyone and everything. A closed societal system is run by a class of rulers composed of priests, elders, politicians, bankers, and military men. All these people prostitute themselves in order to exercise power with the same ease that they drink their coffee.
Kostas is a law-abiding citizen, a quite man living with his mother, his sister Kaiti and his younger brother, Giorgos, who is a student. He works day and night at his kiosk, living to his bone the everyday reality and troubles of the period. He is in love with Eleni and wants to marry her, but he has to wait until Kaiti is married to Leonidas, her extremely conservative fiancé. The military coup of April 1967 forces Kostas to take the side of the winners, hanging, each time, the picture of their most powerful leader, while Giorgos joins a resistance group that sets up bombs. Giorgos’ actions puts Kostas in big trouble.
Rena’s father insists on marrying her off to the son of a shipowner. Rena, however, doesn’t even want to hear about it, so she runs away and disguises herself as a boy named Pipis. As such, she meets a poor fisherman, Lefteris, and helps him on his way to Ioannina.
One of filmmaker and expatriate writer Adonis Kyrou's best-known quotes translates roughly as "I urge you: Learn to look at 'bad' films, they are so often sublime." The same could be said of Kyrou's own directorial work in Greece before the advent of the 1967 dictatorship forced him to flee to Paris. This confused mess, the first cinematic attempt at portraying the Greek resistance in WWII, caused quite a stink upon release, as much for its surprising style (recalling that of Bertolt Brecht) as for its subject matter. Reaction to its screening as part of the 1966 Cannes Film Festival's International Critic's Week was heated and divisive, proving Kyrou's later statement by rising above its own inherent silliness to achieve a sort of rarefied critical status. It's bad drama that nonetheless succeeds by dint of audacity more than quality (a comment which could apply equally to the work of many exploitation directors like Jean Rollin whom Kyrou later so lovingly profiled).
