In 1980s USSR, the Elista Children's Hospital is hit by the country's first major HIV outbreak. Over 70 children and several adults are infected, and now everyone, including doctors, patients, and relatives, must strive to maintain their human dignity in the face of this incurable disease.

The story of three generations of the Gromov family. The main character is Prokhor Gromov: his grandfather Danila made a fortune by robbery and robbery, father Peter invested money in the business and inherited everything to Prokhor. He has an entrepreneurial streak: he equips the forests of Siberia, builds a steel mill, but the richer he gets, the more he turns into a monster.

A deal on assigning for property reveals more new rules and laws of the society in the nearest future. The rates haven’t been so high. Status is everything. Love is nothing.

Having lived in Moscow for many years, successful political consultant Aldar returns to his home in Kalmykia to search for his mother who disappeared in the Steppe. He finds her with the help of the local shaman, and together they make the journey that they didn’t have time to take when she was still alive.

Elza lives in a small town in the Republic of Kalmykia on the Caspian Sea. Another year comes to an end, it’s cold and the steppe is covered in a thin layer of snow. When her husband, who makes a living from illegal fishing, asks her one night what she did during the day, she lies. She wasn’t at her mother’s, but at the bus stop. She thought of leaving – to find out what it might be to escape the infinite expanse of her dreary small world. But she didn’t dare; instead she stays and withdraws into herself, unconcerned by who might see. One day, her husband doesn’t return from a dangerous boat trip. It is said that a fisherman only returns if he has a woman waiting for him and that seagulls are the souls of the missing. At the start of a somewhat unplanned pregnancy, widowed and alone, Elza wanders ever further through the city, plotting a path between tradition and the contemporary until she’s no longer on familiar ground.

The story unfolds somewhere on the shore of the North Sea. Velga and Kirill grew up together, have known each other since childhood. But their feeling of falling in love has matured and fully revealed itself not so long ago. It seems that nothing is able to overshadow their carefree, happy existence, until Velga's older sister, Snega, arrives from the city on the anniversary of her mother's death.