The screening of a movie "Daybreak" at the "Liberty" Cinema is interrupted by an unusual event - actors come to life on the screen, start conversations among themselves, draw the audience into them. Crowds gather around the cinema, the relevant authorities and services wonder what to do in this complicated situation. Also arriving is the censor, a man reaching his fifties, a one-time literary critic and journalist. The line between fiction and reality begins to blur.

On the island of Saint Helena, a prisoner Napoleon resisted allies who, through the voice of the English governor, Hudson Lowe, tried to humiliate him, break him, poison him in the figurative sense of the word, and perhaps literally.

Polish businessman Jarek Branicki organizes a beauty pageant. As the man in charge, he expects his girlfriend to win it and suggests this outcome to the judges. At the same time, however, he is on the verge of bankruptcy and tries to escape the country after being cornered by his creditors. Recognized by a passenger on the train, he flees and finds refuge in the underground passages of Warsaw’s central railway station.

During the Nazi era, a Jewish woman on the run takes a trolley which passes near the Warsaw ghetto, where the uprising battle is taking place, and some passengers are struck by stray bullets. They take temporary refuge in an empty building, and there she has a chance meeting with her ex-fiancé. He offers to put her up--that is, hide her--for a few days. He's now married, a professional who lives in an idyllic suburb reached by a trolley that runs through the woods. His wife seems more committed to putting up the fugitive than he is. The story involves the neighbors, the building owner who avoids involvement and seeks solace in classic poetry, and the super and his suspicious wife.