At the end of World War I, a poor village boy Krsevan commits murder in self-defense and to save his life he fled to Zadar, which is annexed to Italy. As an immigrant, he has been blackmailed by Italian authorities. His poverty and ignorance are the main reason for becoming an Italian spy...
A brief historical background:
After Napoleonic Wars and controversial Congress of Vienna (1814-1815), Zadar was a capitol city of Austro-Hungarian Empire's province Kingdom Of Dalmatia from 1815-1918. Based on a a secret pact between the Triple Entente and Italy, signed in London on 26 April 1915, and known as Treaty of London (1915), Kingdom of Italy claimed large parts of former Austro-Hungarian Empire after the end of WW I. Finally, after the infamous Treaty of Rapallo (1920), large parts of territories inhabited with 480.000 Croats and Slovenians were given to Italy. Thus, although in the middle of Croatian coast on Adriatic sea, this city was never a part of former Kingdom of Yugoslavia (formed after the WW I), nor the Nazi's puppet state of NDH-a (formed in the WW II). After the breakdown of Austro-Hungarian Empire, it was a part of Italy until liberated by Tito's partisan army at the end of WW II, when it finally became a part of Federal State of Croatia, one of six federal states of Federal State of Yugoslavia (1945), later renamed as FNRJ (1946) and SFRJ (1963).
