Three sequences which could have formed separate stories are linked together to give a larger perspective on the nature of reality and film. The three episodes are joined together by one film crew at work. In the beginning, the crew is introduced as they juggle their dual roles as State-supported propagandists who laud their government and society, and as private movie makers working on their own film. Next, they are in a restaurant looking for suitable locations to film when the eatery’s owner is induced to wax long and lugubriously on his miserable life. In the last segment, two extras are in the background of a scene, sitting at a table in a restaurant. It slowly becomes apparent to one of them that the man he’s sitting with tortured him more than 40 years ago at a Nazi concentration camp during World War II.

A collective farm president is deserted by his bride 2 days after the wedding. A comedic radiography of village life.

An ex-convict struggles to survive by brute force alone in a turn-of-the-century slum in Bucharest. Codine is the thug who served 10 years for murdering a friend. He returns home to his miserly mother, whose penny-pinching ways infuriate her son. A young boy looks up to Codine, and through the man's eyes he sees the economic and social injustices from an adult perspective. When Codine kills another man who violated his trust, his mother becomes more unhinged and paranoid. Thinking her son will steal her hoarded money, she plots to kill her only son. The impressionable child watches in horror and amazement at the cruel machinations of the adult work that surrounds him.

A metaphor film, in which a group a pupils are going out on a trip. There are various happenings in which adults are interpreting in different ways and give different meanings to everything.

This movie is about the loneliness of an older lady at the end of WWII, in Bucharest. Her mental faculties are declining and she is increasingly living in her own mind.

The autopsy of a deceased girl finds that the victim had died long before the accident. Taking over the case, "Grandpa" and his assistant, Panaitescu, discover that the perpetrator of the false accident is being blackmailed.