Ovidiu Gorea is a jaded, mid-40s, high-school teacher and novice writer, still living with his parents. He has just published a collection of short stories called 'Nobody Dies For Free', that the bookstores reject because no one buys it.
In a pre-credit sequence two criminals hijack a plane and kidnap a young woman. After parachuting out of the plane with the woman, they pass her over to gangsters. The gangsters then murder the kidnappers.
A talented teenager named Doina is training for an important international piano selection, but the piano is not her real passion and soon she has to choose whether to follow the path everyone else has planned for her or seek her own.
Front austro-hongrois, 1916. Engagé volontaire dans l’armée impériale, le lieutenant roumain Bologa fait partie de la Cour Martiale qui condamne à mort un soldat tchèque pour désertion. Devant l’attitude de certains officiers, Bologa se laisse gagner par des troubles de conscience.
The story follows a young boy, Elev, who is adopted by his uncle, Ioan, and his wife after Elev's father, a partisan during WWII, is killed by soldiers. Ioan is the local village priest and though gentle and intelligent, is frustrated by his ward's apparent inability to love him. Elev, who equally ignores girls his own age, would far rather spend time with Todor, nicknamed Ipu, the so-called village idiot. Together they fish and reenact the French Revolution in the ruins of a neighboring village that was decimated for a minor infraction against the German occupying force.
The film follows the story of Otilia Mihartescu (Anamaria Marinca) and Gabriela "Găbița" Dragut (Laura Vasiliu), two university friends in an unnamed Romanian town. The film is set in 1987, one of the last years of the Ceaușescu regime. When Găbița becomes pregnant, the two girls arrange a meeting with Mr. Bebe (Vlad Ivanov) in a hotel, where he is to perform an illegal abortion (Communist Romania had a natalist policy against abortion).
Dans la Roumanie de Ceaucescu, Nela, fille d'un ancien colonel de la Securitate, refuse de suivre la voie de son père et de sa sœur. À la mort de son père, elle quitte Bucarest pour aller enseigner dans une ville de campagne, elle y rencontre Mitica.
In a suburb of Bucharest, a 13-year-old boy, Andrei (Gabriel Huian), together with some of his friends, watches the prostitutes' show every night from a rooftop and how they are being taken by drivers. The boy falls in love with one of the girls, called Marilena (Mădălina Ghiţescu), and finds out that he needs a decent sum of money in order to approach her. Thus, he steals his father's (Gabriel Spahiu) salary and goes to the prostitutes' meeting place. Marilena's pimp (Andi Vasluianu) is also present, and only agrees to send Marilena and another prostitute with the boy to a nearby pub, where the Rom Elvis is singing (played by the singer Elvis Romano, who translated Elvis Presley's lyrics into his own language). The prostitutes play with Andrei, telling him that he needs a car in order to date them, then they leave. The boy asks Marilena for her phone number, and she writes something in his hand.