Ion Bog

István and Jakab are fire-extinguisher experts. They travel the country to check fire-extinguishers at country factories. During their tours of inspection they chase women, drink in dirty pubs and live in clover.

The film evokes the era of the 1831 cholera epidemic and the peasant uprising which followed it. The way of Doctor Balás, cholera commissioner, and district administrator Hunyor leads through the mountains of Zemplén and is lined by unburied corpses, peasants dying of the illness and of overdoses of bismuth, by the miserably starving population, the healthy digging mass-graves and by uncultivated lands.

This film, set at the beginning of the 17th century, is the first East-European "Eastern". Bocskai István orders the free Heyducks to shepherd a huge herd of cattle through the country torn to three parts, to the Dalmatian coast, where he can get weapons in exchange, for fighting the Austrians.

A continuation of a story started in the drama "With Clean Hands" (1972).

Two Romanian soldiers manage to escape from a camp in Tatra mountains, Czechoslovakia.

An eclectic film, in which suspense and cynicism sometimes meet the grotesque, "Back and forth" reminds, in many ways, the future masterpiece, "Cruise" (1981), directed by Mircea Daneliuc. Placed on the water's edge, where several characters sit with their bellies in the sun and when they talk about what they want and what they don't want, when they keep quiet, "Back and forth" is the graduation film of one of the legendary filmmakers of national cinema.