Maria Teodorescu is an opera singer, who's in Chisinau with her eight year-old son when the Soviets march into Bessarabia in 1940. Her son is taken away from her and sent to Odessa, where he will be re-educated to become a "useful Bolshevik". To get her son back, she has to agree to sing in Soviet theaters and taverns.

An Italian-Romanian co-produced film, many of the film's actors were arrested by the Communists upon the conquest of Romania by the Soviet Army in 1944. The film was banned and was thought destroyed, like most of its kind, until it was discovered in Italian archives more than fifty years later.