Moral shipwreck, not just at sea

January 1993. Piotr Binter, a ship's captain, is summoned in the early hours of the morning because Maritime Rescue has just received a request for help: the Polish ferry Heweliusz is sinking in the Baltic Sea, and he knows its captain very well. The shipwreck will leave more than 50 dead and will affect the life of Witold, a survivor who is having difficulty living with his family again, and will also affect the ferry captain's wife and daughter, and Piotr himself, who is asked to participate in a tribunal to judge what happened. Although several voices blame the shipwreck on the poor condition of the ferry, the shipping company blames the captain and his possible drunkenness, as it refuses to assume financial responsibility for the accident.

This five-episode miniseries adapts a real event that occurred in Poland in 1993. In addition to the misfortune of fifty people who died in a storm, the shipping company and the political and military authorities refused to shed light on the matter. The families of the deceased thus waged a years-long legal battle to establish justice.

The series alternates different moments in time in order to give as complete a picture as possible of what happened: the background of the shipwreck, how the crew members themselves and the rescue services experienced the shipwreck, and the subsequent legal-social conflict. It intelligently interweaves the respective informative labels about the time and place, without being overbearing. As far as the story of the shipwreck is concerned, the production spares no resources to show the storm, the capsizing of the boat and the waves. On the other hand, it is a truly harsh story, which sometimes shows the state of the corpses or mutilated limbs, but with elegance and without excess.

The wide range of characters offers a global overview of the whole event. They are everyday and plausible characters, both the survivors and those who have lost a family member, all of them facing a political-economic framework blinded by their own interests, where the reminiscences of the communist past are noticeable in the characterization of some villains.