Set in Czarist Russia in 1911, and based on the true story of Russian-Jewish peasant Yakov Bok (Sir Alan Bates), who was wrongly imprisoned for a most unlikely crime, the "ritual murder" of a Gentile child in Kiev. We witness the unrelenting detail of the peasant-handyman's life in prison, and see him gain in dignity as the efforts to humiliate him and make him confess fail.