A subway train is blocked between stations on the morning after the fire in the Colectiv Club in Romania.

A Romanian village in the 50s. Năiţă Lucean, a cunning and stubborn peasant, opposes the collectivization process using all possible artifice. He instinctively feels that signing his land and cattle over to the state can only bring bad times for him. His only certainty is the ownership of this insufficient and barren plot of land. Although he strongly opposes it, the idea of the collective good is forcibly enforced.

In 1919, young Doctor Poenaru is sent to be the director at a country hospital. On his way there he meets a formar army comrade, now a lawyer. An ideological and philosophical dispute ensues, the two following different paths in life.

After refusing to compromise at his job, a university professor leaves the city and returns to his native village for the first time in many years.

Cristina, a girl from a well situated family, falls in love with a young working man, who manages to get into college.

The rise and fall of the opportunistic Tănase Scatiu, a boyar in 19th century Wallachia.

In 1946, Northern Transylvania, an armed band is annihilated by the local communist organization, which manages to rally the locals on they side.

Mara, a hard-working widow woman brings up his two children in a developing idustrial Transylvanian town.

Two bleak stories about absent love. In the first, a widow is working hard in a desperate attempt to save her dying daughter. The second tells the story of two wandering singers who kidnap a bride from her wedding.

When a rich Romanian lawyer aims to find his 2 long-lost sons and inheritors he places an ad in the newspaper but many crooks show up instead.