The first full-length work of the Slovak director, author of the poetic parable “Images of the Old World” is the story of the illness of one “little man” and the illness of the whole society. 322 is the cancer code in the medical catalogue of diseases. The main character of the picture, chef Lauko, in the face of death, sums up his life and comes to the conclusion that the cancer he found is retribution for the past. “I wanted to talk about people who are looking for a place among people, looking for themselves,” he said in an interview. Most often a person tries to run away from others and from himself. The title of the film hides not only the diagnosis of a serious cancer, which will radically change the life of the main character Lauko, but also the testimony of time and people - an anamnesis of the "disease" of society of the 60s of the last century.
Most of the film was shot during the introduction of Warsaw Pact troops into Czechoslovakia. In an atmosphere of public turmoil in March 1969, the film was seen at a closed screening in the film studio Koliba, the director of the IFF in Mannheim and decided to send the film to participate in the competition. The painting was smuggled abroad. “The leadership of the Czechoslovak film tried to withdraw the film from the competition, but the festival had its moral credit and at that time did not make concessions,” Hanak himself tells about those events in an interview with the SME newspaper. At the XVIII IFF in Mannheim, the film was awarded the main prize. Despite international recognition, the painting was banned in 1970 and the negatives destroyed, with only a single copy remaining in Mannheim. The film returned in 1989 after the fall of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. The painting was also seen at a dissident festival in Venice.