The movie takes place in the late 1930s in the Far East. A group of pioneering surveyors led by Kirill Kostomarov is to lay the route of a railroad through remote taiga areas. To avoid unnecessary expenditure of human labor, Kostomarov proposes his own variant of laying - along the rocks, not along the floodplain of the river, as approved by the project assignment.

Armen Dzhigarkhanyan
as Кирилл Костомаров

Galina Yatskina
as Ирина

Boris Galkin
as

Alexandr Plotnikov
as

Vasiliy Shukshin
as

Vladimir Koretsky
as

Daniil Netrebin
as

Eduard Izotov
as