October 1918: Karl Liebknecht is released from prison and Berlin workers celebrate his release. Although WWI is almost over, the German Kaiserreich in vain sends its last reserves to the slaughter. The working class is in a rebellious mood; the uprising of Kiel’s sailors against war and...
A wealthy German family is divided by the immorality of Nazi Germany, circa 1944. Former professional colleague, Joachim Peters, escapes from a Nazi concentration camp, and seeks refuge with his friends, the Sonnenbruchs. Torn between their duty as German citizens, and their greater humanitarian...
Poland, during World War II. Martha Weiss, a Jewish woman, arrives at the Auschwitz extermination camp with her family. She is assigned the role of interpreter, but her loved ones are much less fortunate.
A pastor and ethnographer visits a remote corner of 19th-century Lithuania where folk customs associated with the area's pagan past still have a hold on the population.
Bearing traces of the old Anton Chekhov play The Wedding, The Contract is set during an "arranged" ceremony. The bride and groom barely know each other, but this matters not at all to their tradition-bound families. At the last minute, the bride balks. Only slightly nonplused, the groom's father, a...
At the end of World War Two, Polish people move to the western lands vacated by Germans. But some ruthless profiteers pose as government representatives and intend to make off with loot from a deserted town they took over. One honest man stands up against them because he believes these goods belong...
A young man is confronted with corrupt and vindictive colleagues at work and negligent officials at the hospital where his mother is dying. As he searches quixotically for a steadfast moral code by which to live, he suffers from the knowledge of human frailty and our darker inclinations to do harm.
The main character is a bookkeeper, 40, who lives a quiet, uninteresting life with her husband and son of school age. She realizes that soon she won't be needed much at home as the boy grows up and the relationship with her husband crumbles. It's only when an embezzlement is discovered at the...
A statue, fashioned in the guise of an anguished woman, is seen in a remote inn, having been recently interred from the ground. The occasion is a wedding attended by the protagonist, an unassuming man who becomes caught up in a bizarre nightmare when the groom unthinkingly sticks his wedding ring...
Zenon Ziembiewicz, a young, budding journalist, comes to his parents' manor house for a vacation. Here he enters into an affair with the lovely Justyna Bogutówna, the daughter of a cook. When the canicule comes to an end, Zenon packs his bags and leaves for Paris to study. Returning after a year...
In the last days of World War 2, people of various ethnic background meet in a Polish military hospital in a small German town, whereas a Nazi SS division hides in the local forests and tries to move westwards.
Warsaw after the fall of the Warsaw Uprising. The Germans expel the civilian population and then proceed to systematically destroy the city. The capital is transformed into a sea of rubble, among which a few survivors hide – modern-day Robinsons. One of them is Piotr Rafalski, who rescues...
