The story is based on a play by Ivan Kocherha about love against the backdrop of the craftsmen's uprising in Kyiv in the 16th century. The drama and the animation take place simultaneously in Podil, the center of bourgeois and craftsman life, and on mount Vzdykhalnytsia, where the Lithuanian castle is located. The director Tadeush Pavlenko takes the last three acts of Kocherha's play as a basis, placing the female character Melanka, the beloved of Ivan Svichka, at the center of the plot.
