She refuses to cooperate with the abusive system and its officials, who are trying to force her to incriminate a former incidental lover, now an accused political prisoner.

Due to its criticism of the regime, the Polish communist government banned the film from public viewing for over seven years, until the 1989 dissolution of the Eastern Bloc allowed it to see the light of day.

[1] Despite the film's controversial initial reception and subsequent banning, it garnered a cult fanbase through the circulation of illegally taped VHS copies, which director Ryszard Bugajski secretly helped to leak to the general public.

Over the course of several years, she is humiliated and bullied by prison officials with the intention of forcing her to sign false confessions.

After refusing to sign a false confession which denounces a friend, she is taken to the shower block in the basement and placed in a tiny barred cell.

Another episode sees her interrogators stage a scene where a man is supposedly executed for refusing to confess.

Its original version contained scenes set in the modern era, wherein the protagonist's daughter attempts to uncover the truth of her mother's past, as covered in the main plot.

The majority of the commission called the film "propagandistic" and argued that it made an overly political statement about the past which tied this criticism to the current regime.

(...) A mass audience will react to this film unequivocally as, how shall I say, the breaking of human beings by people in Polish uniforms.

"At the commission's suggestion, the Minister of Culture forbade the film's release for fear of how the public would react.

[7] In reality, the film's director had taken great care in researching the imprisonment of women in Stalinist Poland that he depicted.

It will also feature an in-depth interview with the director in which he "discusses the film’s contextual history, its production, the controversy surrounding its release and its eventual withdrawal and banning by Polish authorities".