Ella Arkhangelskaya

They don't really know each other. She lives in penury. He holds a pawnshop. Poverty makes her marry him, despite she doesn't love him and even despises. After the marriage takes place, the family war begins. Based on a novel 'A Gentle Creature' by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Albania in the 1960s, the city of Gjirokastra. Katya, a graduate of the Philology Department of Moscow State University, marries an Albanian, a young historian whom she met in Moscow. Soon after Katya enters into a dialogue with the dictator Enver Hoxha at an art exhibition, her husband is arrested on trumped-up charges.

In the contemporary metropolis (megapolis), there lives a common incomplete family - Tima, a 5-year-old "man", and his mother, Anna, "a lady in search". They are quite happy together, if it were not gnawing in Anna's heart - she's always seeking for a candidate to marry to. That is why, being at a street fire-show one night, she loses her son in the crowd. Tima falls into hands of juvenile homeless offenders who are making their living by dashing under cars or by blackmail. He becomes a member of their band-family and "a source of income". All that had seemed important to Anna before her son's loss now fades into the background. The only Anna's dream now is to find money for ransom.