In this impressionistic tour of Warsaw’s Old Town in the company of a young girl, Munk listens in on the cacophony of city sounds and transforms them into a spontaneous outdoor symphony. 

Munk merges the conventions of social realism with the dark paranoia of film noir in this Rashomon-like tale of the search for the perfect socialist hero. When an elderly railway engineer is killed by a speeding train, the authorities investigate to determine his identity. Each witness, however, has a different vision of how he lived his life—and ended it—in their new socialist world: he was by turns proud and contemptuous, bitter and spiteful, or compassionate and heroic. This complex character study is enhanced by brilliant black-and-white nighttime photography by Romuald Kropat, and especially by the striking images of behemoth trains speeding through the night as characters cling to their sides.