Soviet film from the Malokartinie "era of few films" following the Second World War, portraying the antiracist anthropologist and explorer of New Guinea Nikolai Miklouho-Maklay, who wanted to prove scientifically during the 19th century that "all human races are equal". Shot in Odesa, the Papuan characters are played by Black actors from the Americas and Soviet disguised extras.
At the end of his life, an always ill from tropical fever Nikolai (Sergei Kurilov, Maximka, here for his first great role) tells his whole scientific story. Willing to fight the theory of the superiority of a white race, he sails around the world to go to study the less known people of New Guinea. During his trip, he meets Margarita (Galina Grigoreva, Kashchei the Immortal), the daughter of the former Prime Minister of the Australian New South Wales Robertson (Aleksey Maksimov, The Fifth Ocean), and falling in love together, she promises to wait for him. But another man, the German Brandler (Mikhail Astangov, a famous theater actor having featured Hitler in the later Battle of Stalingrad), who wants "the German eagle to spread its wings over all the seas and the oceans of the world", is decided to "shadow his footsteps", and appoints a sailor, Thomson (Georgiy Budarov, Professor Mamlok), to spy on him.
Arriving on the northeast coast of New Guinea, Nikolai gets ashore with Thomson and a young African, Boy (Jim Komogorov, son of an Afro-American member of the Communist Party of the United States and a Russian working girl). Here he meets the Papuan, living like "in the Stone Age", and decides to communicate unarmed but with "an anthropological compass and an umbrella", only with "kindness and truth". Nikolai becomes friend with Ur (Weyland Rodd, a Black American actor settled in Soviet Union, Fifteen-Year-Old Captain), but Malu (Robert Robinson, a Jamaican worker in USSR) remains defiant.
Shall Nikolai, while sharing their "joy and sorrow", manage to get the friendship and esteem of the Papuan tribes? Shall he succeed in gathering in his materialist point of vue the scientific and definite proofs of the unicity and equality of humanity? Shall he be able to thwart the tricks of Brandler and his henchman Thomson, the real "savages" indeed, who want to embezzle his scientific work in order to make Germany colonize this part of New Guinea? Shall he finally retrieve his beloved Margarita to share with her his passion for science and mankind?
The film, emphasizing Maklay's scientific methods which destroy "the claim of profound differences between races" and such things as dolichocephalic supremacy or Victorian prejudices, is obviously targeting the racist Nazi ideology which has just devastated the world, Nikolai's main opponent being thus a German, but also aims at racism in the Western and now rival countries, with an England "responsible for the total extermination of the natives of Tasmania", and the USA used to prove that "standards of humanity do not apply to Black people". And "for money has no fatherland", they are all "bound together by the instinct of colonial masters". Ode to human fraternity, the film follows the destiny of these different characters confronted to "powerful ennemies" but sharing together hope for the future.
