The film's story revolves around Andrés Mayta, an Aymara Indian from an ayllu [indigenous community] on the Isla del Sol, the legendary homeland of the Inca Empire on Lake Titicaca. One day when Mayta is away in nearby Copacabana, his wife Sabina is assaulted and raped by the local mestizo trader Rosendo Ramos, on whom the ayllu depends to sell its produce. Mayta returns to find Sabina lying on the floor outside their home, and she is able to tell Mayta her aggressor's name before she dies. A year passes by and despite the community's meetings to decide how to deal with the crime, Mayta says nothing, and continues to live his everyday life. One day as Ramos is leaving the community, Mayta ambushes him and exacts his revenge, killing his wife's murderer with his bare hands. The narrative symbolism could scarcely be clearer: the greedy and socially-mobile mestizo Ramos rapes and murders the indigenous community; the inevitable response is violent uprising and the death of the oppressor. [Wood, David M. J. "Indigenismo and the Avant-Garde: Jorge Sanjinés' Early Films and the National Project." Bulletin of Latin American Research, vol. 25, no. 1, 2006, p. 73.]