Peasant girl Jagna is forced to marry the much older, wealthy farmer Boryna, despite her love for his son Antek. With time, Jagna becomes the object of envy and disdain with the villagers and she must fight to preserve her independence.
In 1945, as Stalin sets his hands over Poland, famous painter Wladislaw Strzeminski refuses to compromise on his art with the doctrines of social realism. Persecuted, expelled from his chair at the University, he's eventually erased from the museums' walls. With the help of some of his students, he starts fighting against the Party and becomes the symbol of an artistic resistance against intellectual tyranny.
Anna, a young novitiate in 1960s Poland, is on the verge of taking her vows when she discovers a family secret dating back to the years of the German occupation.
Poland, 1978. Edward Srodon, a zootechnician, makes an accidental stop at the Dziabas family farm, located in the remote area of the Bieszczady Mountains. Years later, on a winter day during Martial Law, a People's Militia investigation team examines a crime scene.
Bronek Pekosinski lives in Zamosc, Poland. He is probably 83 years old. He has no family and does not really know who he is. Everything about his life is fictitious: symbolic is the date of birth - the day World War II broke out, as well as his surname - after PKOS, an abbreviation of a charitable institution, and the place of birth - the Nazi concentration camp, from where his mother threw him over a barbed wire fence. Even his friends and guardians turned out to be false. Only his loneliness and his hump seem to be authentic. Two great powers have vied for young Bronek's soul: Roman-Catholic church and a totalitarian state. He fell into alcoholism. Partially paralyzed as the effect of cerebral hemorrhage, he is fired with an ambition of acquiring a mastery in a game of chess.
A group of students are spending the summer vacation at a university camp studying the science of linguistics. One of the camp directors, Jaroslaw, is a young professor who prefers the straightforward, intimate approach to students. He is opposed in his liberal views by Jakub, who likes to manipulate people. There is a confrontation from the beginning when Jaroslaw allows to attend the seminar a student who presents the views not according to the official line. In the end, a jury prize is given to mediocre paper, while the suspected school of thought still draws a recommendation. Finally the deputy rector arrives for the closing ceremonies, and since he disfavors the line of thought awarded by the recommendation the tensions rise. They climax when student in question bites the rector in the ear while receiving recommendation. The confrontation results in a scandal and the police is called in.
