Based on the short story of the same name by B. Lavrenev. The drama is about a boy, a boiler cleaner, stuck in the pipe of a steamer. And about the people who, despite all circumstances, have to deliver urgent freight...

The film takes place in 1850, Texas, United States. Louise, daughter of the wealthy plantation owner Poindexter, master of the hacienda Casa del Corvo, falls in love with a poor mustanger Maurice Gerald. The night their secret rendezvous happens, her brother Henry disappears. Suspicion in murder falls on Gerald, who was found covered in blood, with signs of struggle on the body and on Henry's cloak. One more minute, and an angry crowd would have Gerald lynched, but then the mysterious Headless Horseman appears...

This bleak late soviet-era drama follows the career of Malyanov, a young medical school graduate who has been sent to work in Turkmenia. Here he runs into a hodge-podge of people of differing ethnicities, all of them victims of the government's earlier mania for relocating and eliminating whole ethnic groups and classes of people. These desperately unhappy people are unable to find any pleasure in this diverse companionship, but instead are antagonistic to it, and often resort to desperate measures in their doomed attempts to ease their pain.

Zosia and Anton are simple, peaceful people who have been drawn into the war by fate. They are on their way to the city from a partisan unit, and no one knows which of them will return. Anton, an experienced partisan who has been in dangerous situations, has suddenly broken down and wants to survive at any cost, even by betrayal. Anton reveals his plan: to turn himself in to the Germans and live a quiet, peaceful life... Zosia refused flatly, but Anton wants to survive by any means necessary, even if it means betraying Zosia, whom he clearly likes...