This is Mihály Kertész’s single surviving Hungarian film. It was made in Spring 1919, after the outbreak of the revolution, in order to illustrate a propaganda poem by Antal Farkas, published on March 26 in the socialist paper “Népszava”. The text of the poem appears from time to time in the intertitles. The film starts with the portrayal of a family of three people, seen at home and in a typical workers’ milieu: the father is reading, the mother is sewing, and the child is watching them. Suddenly the door opens, but it was just the wind. They listen outwards, waiting for someone. Now we can see the brother of the man fighting on the front, where he is wounded, then sent to prison. On the prison wall there is an inscription: “Proletarians of the world, unite!”. The brother, escaped from the prison, is now waving a flag and talking to the mob. The door opens again, and the much awaited brother steps in, while a large revolutionary crowd marches in the streets. The family is now seen in a bourgeois milieu, looking at the march in the street from the window.

A man invites his countrymen to rebellion with the desperate force of his character and manages to push them to revolt. Ozskar Beregi climbs a hill, injured, suffering, with a flag grasped between his hands and immediately, as if sprouting directly from the Hungarian soil, a crowd of patriots forms around him. The colours are magnificent and the eclectic Kertész makes no effort to adapt himself to the epic form. Absolute simplicity, and shots which, in their length rather than from the camera angles of the screenplay, must render the sense and depth of heroic action carved into History.