Set in the 1890s on the Hungarian plains, a group of farm workers go on strike in which they face harsh reprisals and the reality of revolt, oppression, morality and violence.

It has been fifteen years since the death of her father, Agamemnon, and Elektra still burns with hatred for Aegisztosz, who conspired with Elektra's mother to kill him.

Dery is a grande dame actress of the Sarah Bernhardt school of big-gesture theater. Her beauty and popularity is fading, and a new school of acting which involves the use of one's own emotions (a-la Eleanora Duse) is emerging in the person of her younger Viennese rival. She thinks of retiring from the stage, and reunites briefly with her estranged husband in a newly-built manor in the country. Finding that life there is boring, she returns to town, the theater, and her old friends.

Looking for a safe place to live after being harassed by her husband, a depressive and violent man, Juli stays at a women's shelter run by Mária.

Zsadányi flees from the authorities with his goddaughter, Bankós Mari, and they escape into the forest. The film then skips ahead thirty-fold years: Zsadány and Mari are now lovers, with the sound of war in the background halting their romance. The old friends of Zsadányi have joined with the Nazis, and the landowner living with his peasants in a socialist community grows distant from them. Zsadányi is held responsible for political problems in the country, and will pay with his life.

When middle-aged Kata realises that her life will only be complete if she has a baby of her own, her longstanding-but-married boyfriend Joska refuses to comply. But by developing an unlikely friendship with the angst-ridden teenage orphan Anna, who is also involved in a controversial relationship, Kata discovers aspects of herself, and her role as a woman, that have gone unexamined throughout her entire, lonely life.

Juli, who works in a brick factory, begins a romantic relationship with her boss, to whom she hides the fact that she has a son.

The movie portrays a peasant revolt in Hungary in the early twentieth century.