In 1936, a time when Bucharest was known as the "Paris of the East", the three Duduleanu sisters, from a family of prosperous merchants, rule their clan with an iron fist. Young journalist Mircea Aldea joins the clan by marrying their daughter, but the union is short-lived.
The explosion of a 4300 tones Kauper furnace brings up an inquiry, conducted by Ștefan, a Romanian Communist Party activist. He is trying to get to the truth, even if he is pressured just to assign blame.
In the winter of 1933, an illegalist (a communist, member of a political party a party outlawed at the time) assumes the mission of a wounded colleague to transmit a secret message.
The life-story confession of a prisoner waiting for his trial. Victor Petrini, a promising intellectual in the 1950s and a lecturer in Philosophy is arrested by the repressive secret police, wrongly accused of espionage, and sentenced to prison and forced labor.
Traumatized by the loss of his wife, Vasile, an engineer, joins a new work collective in the provinces, at the ARO factory. Saddened by his loneliness, Cristina overcomes his resistance by becoming close to his little boy.
Adam, a young and poor fisherman, falls in love with Uliana, but the girl's parents want her to marry Simion. To get rid of him, Simion blames Adam of the drowning of his fellow fishermen he was with out in a storm.
A journalist in a Bucharest publication, is the accidental witness of the street arrest of a communist. It intervenes in the defense of the young man, who manages to escape, and is arrested. He is obliged to look for the missing woman.
A medic is hunted by guilt of killing a man in a car accident, a cop who staged an experiment of placing a dummy on the side of the road and a dead man found found on the side of the road.
The movie is based on a true story from the end of WWI, in Transylvania. A nobleman who owned some land in Transylvania returns home to find a part of his fortune burned to ashes during late 1918 when power was trasfered from AustroHungary to Romania. Looking for revenge, he ordered the killing of...
Being in an unhappy marriage, the wife of an important director complains to the party when she is threatened by divorce, saying that her husband has an antisocial behavior. This is an occasion for the people present at that meeting to evaluate their own personal lives.