The film's producer, Aviva Kempner, originally had planned to do her documentary on the Warsaw ghetto uprising. During her research she went to Israel and met with Itzhak Arad, the head of Yad Vashem, who had written a book, Ghetto in Flames, about Vilna, site of the very first column of Jewish resistance against the Nazis during the Holocaust, and suggested she do the film on that instead.
Director Aviva Kempner coincidentally has the same last name as Vitka Kempner, one of the resistance fighters and wife of the film's hero, Abba Kovner, but they are not related.