The ship sails down the Yenisei River to the city of Igarka. Its passengers are those who in the 1930s and 1940s were repressed, exiled here and lived here for some part of their lives. Those who survived, half a century later, want to return to their own past. It's fun on the boat now. A song is being sung about "... everything will pass, both sadness and joy." Former "convicts" and "special settlers" relax in deck chairs on the deck, in the evenings they dance there to the orchestra, sing to the accordion - and calmly, without anguish, remember the destroyed, crumpled youth. Then some were signed up as fists, others as spies, and all of them were sent to Igarka, almost to the end of the world. And although this past seems like a dream, they cannot escape from it...