This is one of the first innovative films, which signaled the close of the period of schematic characterization in Bulgarian cinema and marked the beginning of the collaboration between Rangel Vulchanov and Valeri Petrov. The story is based on real event. After the upheavals in 1923-1925 a group of political prisoners have been exiled to the Black Sea island of St Anastasia.
On the Small Island, based on the same ideological and artistic sources as the works of the "Polish school", introduced true poetry and passion into the provincialism of Bulgarian film, and above all freely employed the immense vocabulary of film language. Vulchanov's film was attacked as being the deviation from the party line, and was labeled pessimist, existentialist, Freudian, and so on. Mira Liehm, Antonín J. Liehm.