A young man is confronted with corrupt and vindictive colleagues at work and negligent officials at the hospital where his mother is dying. As he searches quixotically for a steadfast moral code by which to live, he suffers from the knowledge of human frailty and our darker inclinations to do harm.
At the end of World War Two, Polish people move to the western lands vacated by Germans. But some ruthless profiteers pose as government representatives and intend to make off with loot from a deserted town they took over. One honest man stands up against them because he believes these goods belong to the people.
A pastor and ethnographer visits a remote corner of 19th-century Lithuania where folk customs associated with the area's pagan past still have a hold on the population.
