This is the second installment of a three-part series of autobiographical films about the director's life. The first, which won various awards for its maker, was entitled Zamri Oumi Voskresni and was later retitled Zari, Umri, Vokresni ("Freeze-Die-Come to Life"). At the end of that film, set at the conclusion of World War II, the young Valerka was striving hard to overcome the inertia of just getting by, along with his sometime friend Galiya. In this one, he is adjusting to Galiya's death and is back in school and is living with his mother, a prostitute. After a girl at the school is found to have been gang-raped, the headmaster chooses Valerka to be one of the scapegoats, though he had nothing to do with the deed. The punishment seems mild enough, he was simply expelled from school. However, after quarrelling with his mother about the incident, he takes to the road, and discovers a society so bleak, degraded and hopeless that it is a wonder he remained alive.

Anya is brought up in an orphanage, she has been in the school of ballroom dancing. She falls in love with the head of school, who is much older than her. After a quarrel with him Anya throws the newly born child in the hospital and goes to the village where settles in an abandoned house. Her peer Sanya, who secretly and hopelessly in love with Anya, leaves the children's home together with her. At first, he seems to be a child, unable to take a serious and responsible decisions, but gradually Anya sees that he grows up and falls in love with him.

A sudden hero dressed in all black (including underwear) emerges in the small Russian town to fight for justice.

Alex is creating a databank of dreams, claming he knows how to digitise the dreamimage. It is just a self publicity ploy and Alex is soon woken up to the reality of underprivilege, corruption and state terror by an ex-convict Lubov, with whom Alex has an unlikely love affair.