A girl leaves behind her past life as a dancer working in Mohammed Ali Street and enters college. Her ambition is to acquire knowledge and to leave behind her former life. She finds herself in a relationship with a young man from an affluent background and thus becomes conflicted between her two lives.
A poor girl lives on the rooftop of a building. Three young neighbors fall in love with her. The decide to help her when they discover that she is seriously ill and in need of an urgent operation.
Zuhra has nothing to do but to runaway after her family forced her to marry an old rich man. She goes to Alexandria where she works in a motel and there she meets people with different ideologies and thoughts about life.
Mahgoub is a villager who moves to Cairo in search of a better life. When he enlists friend Salem's help to find him a job, Salem not only gets him a job at the ministry where he works but he finds him a bride as well.
In a French seaside town, at a boarding house for civil servants recovering from surgery and maladies, the six male residents' lives change dramatically when two women arrive: Catherine, lively, sexually liberated, willing to kiss, dance, and sleep with the men, and Leonie, reserved, formal, conservative.
The film by Brakhage commonly referred to as "Wecht" does indeed exist. It doesn't have a titlecard at the head, and the leader of the original is labeled "Portrait" in Stan's handwriting, so I'm not sure where the 'Wecht' title comes from.