After the military coup in 1973, deposed President Salvador Allende's closest collaborators and ministers were locked up in a concentration camp on Dawson Island, lying at the western entrance to the Straights of Magellan (nicknamed the Chilean Guantanamo Bay). To cancel traces of their identities, they are assigned numbers instead of names. Their lives are spared thanks to pressure from the International Red Cross, but this does not change the hostile atmosphere, torture and forced work. Thirty years later, some survivors return to the island and rediscover the place where they learnt to survive in extreme conditions, even re-assuming the political roles they held in the government while in prison. Miguel Littin took inspiration from the autobiography by Sergio Bitar, one of Allende's ministers, a prisoner who was assigned the number 10 referred to in the film's title. Writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez dedicated his book Clandestine in Chile: The Adventures of Miguel Littin to the filmmaker who spent many years living in exile.