It tells a story of a bird-monster from South America originally treated as god by Incas. Long believed to be extinct, due to genetical experiment gone awry its egg fossil hatches and the monster starts to search for females to impregnate.

Set in 1946, the film tells a story of a Polish villager returning home after years in a concentration camp. Mateusz is an old-timer, a saddler, who finds nothing but hostility when he makes it home after years away. He is not a Jew, though the villagers brand him one and give him a hard time. They feel guilty about the death of his son at the end of the war, and don't want the father around. In the background: beginnings of the Communist regime in Poland.