Budapest in the thirties. The restaurant owner Laszlo hires the pianist András to play in his restaurant. Both men fall in love with the beautiful waitress Ilona who inspires András to his only composition. His song of Gloomy Sunday is, at first, loved and then feared, for its melancholic melody triggers off a chain of suicides. The fragile balance of the erotic ménage à trois is sent off kilter when the German Hans goes and falls in love with Ilona as well.
Ben Kline is an American television star and a bankable name, who is cast to portray the Hungarian writer Miklos Radnoti, whose journal of poems was found with his body, buried in one of Hungary’s mass graves. Kline is also the son of a Holocaust survivor and has long resented his father’s refusal to speak about the War. Now given the opportunity to play the role of a hero, but faced with the reality of a victim, the boundaries between truth and illusion begin to blur.
From the intrigues and slander of the branch the painter Hódosi moves out to a hamlet at Hortobágy. He gets into conflict situation as well as he cannot endure that the political and economic elite of the neigbourhood would devastate the nature conservation area with hunting and (tax evading) goose husbandry.
Janos Flandera (Frigyes Funtek) is a student who is kept by an older woman in this depressing drama. When he applies to a prestigious school in Moscow, he is turned down because he is a gigolo. Not only is his scholarship request denied, he is sentenced to a year in prison at hard labor. Janos abandons the jealous older woman who helped deny his entrance to the school. Punished after defending a political prisoner, Janos takes solace in love affairs, but his union with the crippled daughter of a prominent political official puts his life in danger.
Film about the Holocaust. A Jewish family is allowed to keep the flat they have always lived in and to live a relatively normal life. One day their 10-year old son disappears. He has been sent to a deportation camp which seems like paradise except that the inmates are being used for medical experiments.