A dream-like meditation on post-industrial life in Communist Poland.

In 1668 Polish colonel Michał Wołodyjowski, who recently retired to a monastery, is recalled to active duty and takes charge of Poland's eastern frontier defenses against invading Tatar hordes and Ottoman armies.

A young Polish filmmaker sets out to find out what happened to Mateusz Birkut, a bricklayer who became a propaganda hero in the 1950s but later fell out of favor and disappeared.

A famous Polish journalist presents a problem for the powers-that-be when he displays his full political skill and knowledge on a television show featuring questions and answers on a world conference by a panel of journalists. His enemies take away his privileges when he is away. The shock of being "unwanted" parallels a deeper disappointment in his private life: his wife has an affair with a jealous young rival, and after 15 years of marriage and two daughters wants a divorce. She offers no explanations as he tries to untie these problems himself. All the moves he makes are the wrong ones. He takes on drinking heavily with students eager to attend his seminar after discovering the class has been canceled. The journalist, once suave and commanding, is reduced to silence.

Girls no more, four heroines emerge into womanhood with a more clear-eyed outlook on life.

A woman just out of prison gets a job in a nursing home and tries, unsuccessfully, to put her life back together.

Roman Jacenko, a local photographer tries to turn his fortunes around and rob a bank transport.

A peasant girl is abandoned by her fiancé after she has talked her father into giving her his land as a dowry.

Young Małgorzata leads a very boring life as a cashier. One day a robber riddles her bank car with bullets, kills the driver and two security guards and takes the money. The police finds out that the stolen banknotes are being spent at a fashionable spa resort. The only way to find the criminal is to favor Małgorzata with a seaside holiday in the company of a handsome Captain as her brother.

A story of a dropout out of a succesful career and a loving family. He goes to a local railroad station, then checks into a hotel and refuses to leave despite visits by a psychiatrist and his own son. He watches people daily at the station. A tv reporter is trying to come up with a story which would help him to save his job. He likes to chase women and the dropout's wife is one of his targets. He gets interested in the story of her husband and tries to make a program about mysterious individual. Once the tv crew arrives to the scene, the subject tries to hide and ends up on the roof of the station, where he catches a glimpse of sunshine - the "smaller sky" - before stepping onto a glass roof and falling to his death.