King Lear, old and tired, divides his kingdom among his daughters, giving great importance to their protestations of love for him. When Cordelia, youngest and most honest, refuses to idly flatter the old man in return for favor, he banishes her and turns for support to his remaining daughters. But Goneril and Regan have no love for him and instead plot to take all his power from him. In a parallel, Lear's loyal courtier Gloucester favors his illegitimate son Edmund after being told lies about his faithful son Edgar. Madness and tragedy befall both ill-starred fathers.

The mayor of a village sees her son killed in a gun accident. A successful, dedicated bureuacrat, she must reconcile her desire to build a bridge - and the new housing that will come with it - with the reality of resistance from the townspeople and her own grief.

Having worked at a construction site all her life, Zina raised her son alone. Now that her son is almost an adult, Victor has appeared in her life, with whom she feels good and calm. However, her son Boris is too much used to having his mother belong only to him.

Katerina Izmailova is a filmization of Dmitry Shostakovich's long-suppressed 1936 opera. Galina Vishnevskaya stars as Katerina, a bored 19th century farm wife. At the behest of her grungy lover, Katerina murders her husband and her father-in-law. She and her new beau are both sent to Siberia, where the lover almost immediately takes up with a younger woman. Banned by Stalin for its bleak portrait of Soviet life, Katerina Izmailova was not given a Russian staging for over 40 years; its Metropolitan Opera debut did not occur until 1994.