Based on the story of the same name by Marin Preda. The movie tells about the struggle of poor peasants against the rural rich for the creation of collective farming.

Darclee is a lead singer for an opera company in Romania with a heavy load of responsibility. It seems the company is in dire need of a decent physical structure for their performances and a brace -- or more -- of good singers to improve their image and sales. In other words, they need just about everything except an excellent lead singer; Darclee fills that bill. And so the company rather unfairly leans on her to get the people and the funds they so desperately want.

In the imaginary country of "Allergica", a group of gangsters have made a fat hit by pinning the blame on the Kid, who awaits execution in the terrible "Bing-Bing" prison. At the last moment the electric chair is unplugged because the lawyer has persuaded the doomed man to dictate his gangster memoirs for the use of the Books & Books publishing house. Its director offers him a "bonus to life" only if he plays along. But the Kid prefers to write about truth, people and love.

The Nazi troops are retreating from Romania. On a wester town, they have to be held back until some strategic trains can leave the train station.

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 war widower with two kids marries a rich tanner. Her greed tears the family apart, resulting in a lot of misfortune. Based on "Hiena" novel by Petru Vintilă.

Vulpașin is desperatley in love with Nastasia, but she is partial to Luca, which works at a factory outside the slum they live in ("accros the lifting gate").

A young officer of the Romanian Army performs a sabotage mission against the Nazi regime. Seriously wounded, the officer can not reach the fixed place and finds shelter in a surgeon's home.

Pretentious Chirita weaves big matrimonial plans, because oh, oh what a pain / to have unmarried girls!. Dissatisfied with the boyars who aspire to the hand of her daughters, she descends in Iasi with the opportunity to find them better suitors. Entanglements, chases, travesties, fainting, tricks, twirls, romances, serenades, a king of triviality given as humor and irony.