The restored print was made in 1999 when this film was the only complete Hungarian film of Mihály Kertész in the collection of the Magyar Nemzeti Filmarchívum. (In the years since then two of his Hungarian silent films: A tolonc / The Undesirable, 1914, and Az utolsó hajnal / The Last Dawn, 1917, have been found).
This short agitprop film released barely two weeks after the proclamation of the world’s second communist republic is an adaptation of a revolutionary poem, whose lines appear, written in red, among the sequences. The ‘brother’ missed by his family in a typical work­ing-class milieu is a soldier fighting on the front. He is wounded and captured, but after escaping from prison, he becomes a revolutionary. The political slogan “Proletariat of the world, unite!” appears as a vision on the prison wall. The attractive flag-waving is a recurring element of the choreography (as in Miklós Jancsó’s Fényes szelek / The Confrontation, 50 years later). The directions of movement have a special meaning: the people are moving upwards ponderously in the red-tinted battle scenes, but they are moving downward, irresistibly, like a flood, in the revolutionary scenes. The final scene in which the revolutionist now living in a palace is looking at the revolutionary crowd marching in the street like an outsider also refers to Kertész’s political attitude. Despite being an elected member of the Art Committee Kertész was an outsider as well. He was the master of dream-factory type movie and the art policy of the new regime was against the ‘bourgeois-style films’ so he went to Vienna during the revolution when he received an offer from Sascha Kolowrat. After the breakdown of the communist dictatorship, the film was confiscated and has survived in the police archive.

Gyöngyi Balogh