Dans un avion à destination de Paris, Felicja, une célèbre actrice de radio, se souvient de la nuit de 1939, quand elle devait débuter dans le rôle d'Ophélie, auprès de l'homme qu'elle aimait, Wiktor, qui jouait Hamlet. Lors de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, pour ne pas se compromettre sur les scènes allemandes, elle préfère travailler comme serveuse. Lorsque Wiktor est accusé d'avoir tué un collaborateur, elle lui fournit un alibi. Mais après la guerre, elle est accusée d'avoir collaboré.
A dark coming-of-age film, Samson follows its Jewish protagonist (Serge Merlin) from an anti-Semitic private school to a prison, then into a Jewish ghetto, and finally over the ghetto wall to the outside world. Wajda uses this journey as a means to explore expressionist cinematography and the weighty issues facing the Jewish people.
Set in a seventeenth century Polish convent, a priest, Father Suryn (Mieczyslaw Voit), arrives at a small inn for a night's rest. He has been sent to investigate a case of demonic possession at a nearby convent after a local priest was burnt for sexually tempting the nuns. The next day, he sets out for the convent, where he meets its abbess, Mother Joan (Lucyna Winnicka), said to be the most possessed of all the nuns. Father Suryn will have to go to hell and back to save Joan, casting himself forever into darkness for her salvation.
En Pologne, au XIV siècle. Zbyszko de Bogdaniec, un jeune chevalier polonais, voyage avec son oncle Mathieu sur la route de Cracovie quand il rencontre la jeune Danusia, suivante de la duchesse Anne de Mazovie et fille du célèbre Jurand de Spychow, ennemi juré des chevaliers Teutoniques.
Un jeune médecin en a assez d'être recherché par les femmes. Un soir, il rencontre une jeune fille qui s'introduit de force dans sa chambre où ils parlent de morale et d'amour. Cependant, elle se révèle aussi cynique que lui. Il la perd lorsqu'il sort voir des amis et se lance dans une course effrénée à travers la ville pour la retrouver.
The film begins in 1985, when engineers involved in an industrial project to irrigate the Gobi Desert accidentally unearth a mysterious and apparently artificial "spool". When found to be made of a material unknown on Earth, the spool is circumstantially linked to the Tunguska explosion of 1908. The "spool" is seized on as evidence that the explosion, originally blamed on a meteor, was actually caused by a spaceship. Professor Harringway deduces the alien craft must have come from Venus. The spool itself is determined to be a flight recorder, and partially decoded by an international team of scientists led by Professor Sikarna and Dr. Tchen Yu. When radio greetings sent to Venus go unanswered, Harringway announces that a journey to Venus is Earth's only alternative. The recently completed Soviet spaceship Cosmostrator I (Kosmokrator in the original), intended to voyage to Mars, is redirected to Venus, a 30–31 day trip. During the voyage, Sikarna works furiously to translate the alien message on the disc using the ship's computer.
Poland has been invaded by Nazi Germany. Lotna, a beautiful mare that belonged to a wealthy nobleman, is given to Captain Chodakiewicz (Jerzy Pichelski), the commander of a Polish Cavalry squadron, and immediately becomes a bone of contention for everyone in the unit.
In an unnamed small Polish town on May 8, 1945, the day Germany officially surrendered, Maciek (Zbigniew Cybulski) and Andrzej (Adam Pawlikowski) are Home Army soldiers who have been assigned to assassinate the communist Commissar Szczuka (Wacław Zastrzeżyński), but fail in their first attempt to ambush him, killing two civilian cement plant workers instead. They are given a second chance in the town's leading hotel and banquet hall, Monopol.
The plot involves a Rashōmon-like investigation into the life of a man who has been found dead after having been hurled from a train. As security agents, police and a medical examiner piece together his identity, three accounts emerge: one set during World War II, one in the immediate aftermath of the war, and one in contemporary Poland. In each account, the victim seems to have been a mysterious, ambiguous presence, of shifting loyalties and suspicious connections, who set himself against the powers that be.