For almost a century, Communism attempted to remove the need for God from the soul of the Russian people, but failed. After emerging from the “cruel spiritual winter”, the Russian land produced new growth in the Orthodox Church, nourished by the blood of millions of new Christian Martyrs.
Sixty year old Max is having something of a middle-age crisis. His marriage seems to go nowhere as the passion, tenderness and happiness vanished when their daughter moved out.
A luxury home, a handsome husband and terrific children. But it all comes crashing down when she is accused of being a mastermind behind a brutal triple-homicide and is arrested and handcuffed in front of her own children.
A disgraced sports presenter falls victim to an accidental head trauma and slips into a coma. He awakens months later to find that South Africa was not as he left it, he is now in the New South Africa, and his multimillion-Rand idea has been stolen from beneath him.
Carmen, a journalist with two children, is on her third marriage, to Antonio, a record producer. Over the course of a year, we follow her through her discontents: Antonio's lateness, his fatigue when she wants to make love, his insistence on her company when she prefers solitude, his treating her work as less important than his, his casual and cruel dismissal of her opinions, her boss assigning her an incompetent editor, bartenders ignoring her, her passage into middle age.
Pierre is a womanizing photographer, with a slight mean streak. For whatever reason, Camille, an artist in her own right, finds him entrancing and easily succumbs to his devious efforts to get her into bed.