Stanisław Jaworski

To convince the prison warden against releasing him, a middle-aged Polish man recounts his life, one he considers to have been characterized by exceptionally bad luck.

The story takes place before World War II and centers on Pawel, a member of a conservative, middle-class family, and his love for Lidka, a taxi dancer. Social conventions and the lovers' inability to defy those forces Pawel and Lidka benefit. Times change, war breaks out, leading to Pawel sent to Auschwitz while Lidka marry his cousin. Their love has survived and conventions are no longer the issue.

Anatol Kowalski is an old man who works in a bank and loves his old-fashioned hat. One day the hat gets lost and Anatol decides to buy a new one.

Diver Antoni Barnat is falsely accused of causing an accident underwater that almost led to his fellow diver's death. Interestingly enough, they are both in love with the same girl, Teresa.

In 1950, at night, a passenger train kills a man on the tracks. He is Orzechowski, an engineer since 1914. An inquiry immediately follows. Testimony takes the form of flashbacks. Tuszka, the station master, believes Orzechowski was a saboteur; at least one on the inquiry panel agrees. Zapora, the young engineer on the train that hit Orzechowski, gives more complicated testimony about the dead man - stiff-necked, proud, imperious, critical of Zapora and other younger workers. The signalman at the crossing where Orzechowski died also testifies. Can the panel arrive at the truth in a world where workers unite, inferior coal is a badge of honor, and the old order is suspect?

A factory foreman discovers (to his discontent) that his housewife secretly takes driving lessons in order to get a job and send their son to kindergarten.

Imperialist spies try to disrupt and stop production in a large steelworks.

The first Polish post-war comedy. Witek and Krysia, a married couple, move to Warsaw and have nowhere to stay. They rent a room in a house with many other lodgers. Witek dreams of their own house and draws a sketch of their future home, marking the place where his wife will sleep with the word "treasure". The other lodgers find the draft and a frantic search for the treasure begins.