Two bleak stories about absent love. In the first, a widow is working hard in a desperate attempt to save her dying daughter. The second tells the story of two wandering singers who kidnap a bride from her wedding.
A Romanian village in the 50s. Năiţă Lucean, a cunning and stubborn peasant, opposes the collectivization process using all possible artifice. He instinctively feels that signing his land and cattle over to the state can only bring bad times for him. His only certainty is the ownership of this insufficient and barren plot of land. Although he strongly opposes it, the idea of the collective good is forcibly enforced.
Mara, a hard-working widow, brings up her two children in a developing industrial Transylvanian town.
