A story of love and honor that takes place during the mid-nineteenth century during revolutions, as well as economic, political, and social hypocrisy. Two extraordinary but lonely artists share a passionate love, as evidenced by the preserved letters that they exchanged.

A marquee stands on a sprawling Prague housing estate and is home to two young bricklayers, who have all sorts of life experiences waiting for them in the city. Around the two rural bricklayers absorbed by the big city, the entertainment is more than a little embarrassing, toothless, revealing that at the height of normalisation, even the jolly genre of drama fared poorly, and any satirical allusions were especially undesirable. With no sense of humorous exaggeration and no wittily punctuated plots, the story unfolds, showing how the characters, living in a marquee standing on a sprawling estate, face all the pitfalls of the "big world"...

Two closely related episodes. Youths make problems for two local orchestras about to compete nationally, and in a talent competition a young girl gets stage fright, while another lies to her boss to compete.

A quintet of vignettes based on short stories by Bohumil Hrabal: an eventful trip to the motorcycle races results in drunkenness, long-winded discussions, and death; two elderly men create false biographies; insurance agents visit an eccentric painter/goat farmer and his mother; guests at a wedding reception remain oblivious to outlying misery; and a working-class boy romances a Roma girl.

The dreaded Italian mafioso, Marian Labuda, will also be convinced. Mafioso Carmello was guilty of the principles of his organization when he tried to fool the boss and earned a death sentence. The convict runs away from the killer through Vienna to Prague, which his Austrian colleague in crime recommended as a safe hiding place. None of them knows that the Czechs learned so much tricks under real socialism that a seasoned Italian professional is not enough to watch.

The shoemaker, Lájošek Cína, is a naive good-for-nothing with his heart on his sleeve, who, as the day grows long, never leaves his shop, where he also sleeps, and his only company is a small stray kitten. One day he is approached by a peculiar truck driver, Martin, who immediately adopts Lájošek as his new driver and becomes his life guide with a plan to rebuild his peaceful life from the ground up. In the Žižkov colony at Krejcárk he meets the charming Magda, with whom Lájošek falls in love and begins to live with her and her four children. Soon after, they are expecting their own and their life would seem ideal, but every happiness comes at a price...

No Woman is allowed into Karlstejn Castle! Yet the enamoured Daniele Kolářová and the equally enamoured Jana Brejchová manage to spend one night in disguise in the Castle despite the strict royal ban.