A járvány

The film evokes the era of the 1831 cholera epidemic and the peasant uprising which followed it. The way of Doctor Balás, cholera commissioner, and district administrator Hunyor leads through the mountains of Zemplén and is lined by unburied corpses, peasants dying of the illness and of overdoses of bismuth, by the miserably starving population, the healthy digging mass-graves and by uncultivated lands. The peasants locked up in quarantines run away, robbing and looting the barns of landlords, rioting against retaliation. An emergency summary court is set up, a people's uprising breaks out. The peasants take the devotedly healing doctor for a vicious man feeding poison to them. They torture him and stuff him with a huge dose of bismuth. Event he landlords want to lay hold of him because of his humanitarian views. When the uprising is put down and the peasants have become decimated, they try to do away with him, too. Balás however, is willing to face the fate of the survivors: he disappears as a legendary hero in one of the infected villages. (texto oficial de la distribuidora)