Four women speak movingly to the camera on their experience of the General Strike and life in the 1930s and 40s in a depressed South Welsh mining village.
Shanta Dhamle lives a wealthy lifestyle in Bombay along with her dad, Shamrao, and mom, Ansuya. She incurs their displeasure when she falls in love and gets married to a poor and overly sensitive writer, Gopal, who moves in with them, and continues to suffer verbal abuse at Shamrao's hands.
Pa, a moonshining chicken farmer, is worried that his dim-witted son Junior is becoming way more attracted to their cow Sassy Sue than he should be, so he sets out to gather up all the nubile young farmgirls in the area and get them to show Junior what he's missing.
Two rival street gangs from Kowloon go to war over turf and bar girls so as to dominate the area and maximize their takings; however things go from bad to worse as the girls start to get involved in the bloody feud.
The innkeeper Barnabáš and the teacher Isidor Slovíčko succumb to the lure of old Moreles, to whom the young Taussig sends enthusiastic letters from America.
The unexpected return of his ex-wife and the assembly of a group of protesters both threaten to wreck a corrupt contractor's inauguration party for his new superhighway.
Abel Hradscheck, the owner of an inn in the Oderbruch country, faces financial ruin. For this state of affairs, Ursula, his wife and former actress, is by no means free of blame.
The story of a peasant whose harshness and bluntness only provoke disputes and anger, and his honesty and sense of truth and honor in conjunction with the previous qualities only exacerbate these disputes.