A young academy soldier, Maciek Chelmicki, is ordered to shoot the secretary of the KW PPR. A coincidence causes him to kill someone else. Meeting face to face with his victim, he gets a shock. He faces the necessity of repeating the assassination. He meets Krystyna, a girl working as a barmaid in the restaurant of the "Monopol" hotel. His affection for her makes him even more aware of the senselessness of killing at the end of the war. Loyalty to the oath he took, and thus the obligation to obey the order, tips the scales.

The story takes place before World War II and centers on Pawel, a member of a conservative, middle-class family, and his love for Lidka, a taxi dancer. Social conventions and the lovers' inability to defy those forces Pawel and Lidka benefit. Times change, war breaks out, leading to Pawel sent to Auschwitz while Lidka marry his cousin. Their love has survived and conventions are no longer the issue.

One day in the miserable life of a female factory worker and single mother of four children. One of her sons - ridiculed by his peers - leaves home and gets into trouble.

The finder of a suitcase stolen in 1939 from the French embassy in Warsaw tries to reach its owner.

Middle-aged woman tries to cope with the passage of time and aging, as seen by her daughter.

An engineer comes home from abroad to his waiting wife. After some time, his second wife, an Italian one, joins him. For a small town, such a triangle will turn out to be unacceptable, especially since the spouses live peacefully under one roof.

Four stories showing the various facets of love.

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.

Strange human-shaped phenomenon appears in Piotrowski's new flat and he approaches all available institutions to help him get rid of it.

Zbigniew Cybulski and Sonja Ziemann play lovers struggling to find happiness and privacy in overcrowded Warsaw. The movie shows an honest picture of life in a war-damaged city, contrasting the characters' difficulties with their dreams of a better life. It was banned in Poland in 1958 and would not be seen anywhere until its European release one year later.