The Razzi family owns a small factory of sweets in Macerata. Their desire to enlarge their business to cope with the new Unified European Market brings to a string of fatal mistakes that will ultimately doom their wealth.

Lino lives in Turin with the family of his sister. He doesn't have a good job and never enough money. But in a day his life changes: he wins 1 billion dollars in a lottery and... everyone becomes a friend, the girl who he liked becomes his girlfriend and his sister begins to love him. He leaves Turin with his friend Parola and, in a casino, he loses all money! But luck returns...

Oskar Panizza’s The Council of Love (1895) is a blasphemous play set in 1495, during the first recorded outbreak of syphilis, which Panizza satirically presents as the punishment from Satan for sexually active humans. As a result, Panizza was imprisoned for obscenity. Schroeter alternates scenes from the Panizza’s work with a dramatization of his trial, presenting the play as an expressionist spectacle performed by actors wearing exaggerated makeup who gesture and grimace grotesquely. The film thus forms a bridge between Schroeter’s use of tableaux in his early experiments with the political urgency of his 1980s films. On the eve of the AIDS crisis, Schroeter is presciently worried about disease as an excuse for governmental repression and the oppression of sexuality. - Harvard Film Archive