A young journalist on the track of the perpetrators of mysterious murders in the village of Piaski. Juxtaposed with the transformation of the rural community, conflicts between the old and young generation and the plotting of wealthy peasants who try to undermine the idea of industrial cooperatives.
The editorial team of the newspaper “Trybuna Ludu” gets an anonymous letter with an enclosed photo. It is a photo of a person murdered in Piaski, a village next to Lublin. The journalist Łuczak recognizes the victim as his father and immediately starts his own investigation. After arriving in the village, he goes to the founding meeting of a local production cooperative. A heated debate unfolds. Young people are for the development of cooperatives, seeing future and progress in it. Well-off peasants who own the land are strongly opposed to this. There is also talk of the devil murdering people in the village, among them the journalist’s father. The founder of the cooperative, Janicki, also gets killed, but the investigation brings no results. People start to talk only after Łuczak finds his mother’s portrait hidden by one of the peasants. It turns out that the village was terrorized by a group of kulaks who used people’s belief in superstitions and the devil for their own purposes.
