Cyrus James (Parker Stevenson), an American traveling in Australia at the turn of the century, encounters the riverboat Philadelphia, skippered by Brenton Edwards (John Waters) and his family. The Edwards clan loves plying the river, but when patriarch Brenton is unjustly sent to prison, Cyrus does all he can to help the family put bread on the table until their father can return home.
A village has to be destroyed for coal mining. Henning, a 15 years old boy, who wants to visit his grandfather one more time, realizes that nothing will be the way it used to be.
As he gradually turns mad, the dancer Nijinsky evokes the important episodes of his life. In costumes and sets of lush beauty, the divine puppet performs in a final show where the secondary characters are named: Diaghilev, Isadora Duncan, Stravinsky, Auguste Rodin, Léon Bakst.
"I have not been very active as a social filmmaker anymore after the revolution, though I had great plans and projects at the start of the revolution! So far I have made many so-called commissioned industrial films for national oil, gas, and steel companies as well as for government ministries, in which I tried to bring the films as close as possible to my taste and to my way of thinking and make the films' sponsors to see the world from content and formal viewpoints.
The boisterous good humor of Jurmala, the nickel-mine owner, is, if anything, only barely dented by the raging battles in Finland before, during and after World War Two.
Young people living in Poland in the late 1960s had to face difficult times and make tough choices. Some of them were forced to leave their country for having Jewish origin.
