The leading character in this documentary is a puppet master who performs his art in a city of the former Soviet Union. The melody imbues the landscape and there is no plot. There is silence, an absence of colour and a portrayal of time which does not seem to pass. In the memory of the day passed by is a mixture of registers, borrowed partly from documentary, partly from fiction. Some of the scenes have come to form part of the collective imagination. There is a moment when an old man rings the church bells, a moment in which music and image melt masterfully into one. Bartas’ ability to achieve such effects in his films have been described as sensibility exposed in its purest form.