Fernández reunited many of the actors and much of the production team that had helped his films earn international success in the preceding years.

Circumstances resulting from the Tito–Stalin split, however, led to its late 1952 release in Yugoslavia as Jedan dan života (Serbo-Croatian Cyrillic: Један дан живота, transl.

Belén Martí (Columba Domínguez), a journalist from Cuba, ventures on her own to Mexico in order to investigate and write about the Mexican Revolution then underway.

She learns upon arriving that a revolutionary officer, Colonel Lucio Reyes (Roberto Cañedo), has been convicted of treason and sentenced to execution by firing squad for leading an armed revolt that protested the assassination of Emiliano Zapata.

Martí worries in anticipation of the moment when Mamá Juanita learns the truth about her son, but the old lady remains undaunted in her belief that he will come.

Unexpectedly, Reyes arrives in the company of Gómez, who had conceded the visit as a last request to his friend, as well as a token of his own love for Mamá Juanita.

Martí pleads with Reyes and Gómez to devise a plan of escape, but the former refuses for fear of inadvertently making the townspeople complicit in the crime.

[7] As a melodrama that combines themes of patriotism, family, and romance, Un día de vida is considered a typical product of the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema.

Emilio Fernández, aided by Gabriel Figueroa's cinematography, created in the film an idealization of reality that depicted Mexico as both new and ancient, and Mexicans as a proud and humble people.

Un día de vida was subsequently released in the rest of Latin America, where it also failed to gain wider attention.

[7] In the years immediately after World War II, a power struggle that erupted within the Eastern Bloc between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia ultimately led to the Tito–Stalin split in 1948.

[9] According to Miha Mazzini, Yugoslav authorities found Mexican films to be ideologically suitable because they were non-threatening, but "talked about revolution in the highest terms".

[8] Un día de vida was released in Yugoslavia as Jedan dan života (Serbo-Croatian Cyrillic: Један дан живота) in late 1952.

Mazzini wrote:[8] Emilio Fernández's Un día de vida became so immensely popular that the old people in the former republics of Yugoslavia even today regard it as surely one of the most well known films in the world ever made; although, in truth, it is probably unknown in every other country.

[8]The film's success led to the Yu-Mex boom of the 1950s and 1960s, wherein Yugoslav musicians performed music in the style of Mexican canción ranchera.