Mara, a hard-working widow, brings up her two children in a developing industrial Transylvanian town.

The plot take place in 1883 in a small provincial town in Romania, where the corrupt establishment decide everything, including - of course - who will be the "elected" representative to the national Senate. A love letter from the bachelor mayor to the wife of the local party chief, gets lost and found by a drunk party supporter. The letter finds its way to the opposition party, which decide to use the letter by blackmailing the powerful local "camarilla", and to get his own man to represent the county. What follows is not easy to guess...

Nicolae (George Motoi), the intelectual descendant of Moromete family, former communist apparatchik in the 50s, becomes a horticultor due to a political error, and refuses to have any social life, even if he is unhappy with his inactivity. The death of his partner makes him respond to the overtures of his old comrades. Based on the eponymous novel by Marin Preda.

Some party representatives want to make a new football team.

Tudor Vladimirescu fights against the Ottoman Turkish domination of Romania and the social agitation ,his story includes the war between Russia and Turkey from 18o6 to 1812,for which he was decorated by the Russians.

During the summer of 1944, while Romanians turn weapons against Nazis, Mihai, an orphan teenager whose parents died in a bombing, tries to enlist in order to fight in the front line but he discovers that former police commissioner Potra tortured and beaten prisoners, including his father, who was political detained. Mihai will fight to bring Potra in front of the justice.

Two bleak stories about absent love. In the first, a widow is working hard in a desperate attempt to save her dying daughter. The second tells the story of two wandering singers who kidnap a bride from her wedding.

Vying for Principality of Moldavia's throne the descendants of Prince Stephen the Great start a bloody civil war in 1612.

Based on a theatrical text by Romanian writer Ion Luca Caragiale (1852-1912), who was a bitter and funny witness of the turn-of-the-20th-century Romanian bourgeois mores, Carnival Scenes manages to preserve and further enhance the slightly hysteric atmosphere of his plays. Pintilie creates a strange combination of carnival scenes which is brought to the screen as a burlesque, fast-paced, screwball comedy with a meditative undertone. This film was banned in Romania for a decade until the death of Ceausescu in 1989 and was only released after the 1989 revolution.

Mitu and Elena get to know each other in the course of a vodka drinking contest and discover that they are both dissatisfied with the status quo. Mitu is about to begin military service and Elena is to be married to a man she does not love. They decide they are meant for each other and plan on a different future, one that is on a collision course with the authorities, and start a mad affair.