A teenage postal worker, Tomek, routinely spies on his older neighbor Magda, a sexually liberated artist who lives in the apartment across the courtyard from his. As their private worlds merge, fascination turns to obsession, and the line between love and curiosity becomes violently blurred.
19-year-old Tomek whiles away his lonely life by spying on his opposite neighbour Magda through binoculars. She's an artist in her mid-thirties, and appears to have everything - not least a constant stream of men at her beck and call. But when the two finally meet, they discover that they have a lot more in common than appeared at first sight...
A Pole who spent time in an internment camp during the war on the Swiss-German border, visits the site many years later and recalls these days. He meets with other Poles confined in the same camp, including several women, in whose he had romantic interests.
A famous Polish journalist presents a problem for the powers-that-be when he displays his full political skill and knowledge on a television show featuring questions and answers on a world conference by a panel of journalists. His enemies take away his privileges when he is away. The shock of being "unwanted" parallels a deeper disappointment in his private life: his wife has an affair with a jealous young rival, and after 15 years of marriage and two daughters wants a divorce. She offers no explanations as he tries to untie these problems himself. All the moves he makes are the wrong ones. He takes on drinking heavily with students eager to attend his seminar after discovering the class has been canceled. The journalist, once suave and commanding is reduced to silence.
The young protagonist, Elżbieta, grew up in a small town bourgeois house. She rebels against the town's atmosphere and imagines that a love affair with a poet from a big city will liberate her. However, the love affair lasts only for a fleeting moment. It is the young engineers who arrive in the town to build a factory who are the real harbinger of changes in the town itself and the minds of its inhabitants. Based on a novel by Kornel Filipowicz.
The main character has quit school, makes a living by taking pictures. He seduces a nurse who treated his head wound which he earned in a fight. They witness a hit-and-run driver killing a little girl on a sled. He builds up an elaborate trap by putting a doll dressed as a child down the hill in the path of a car. The man hits it and thinking that he hit a child - runs. Marek takes pictures of him and tries to blackmail him to use his car for a week. He wants to use the car to win back the nurse, who could not cope with his humors...
