After the revolution of December 1989, Romania is in full transition. Incertainty and chaos have followed Ceausescu's downfall. Fane, a worker in a wharf on the river Danube, is a former dissident who was in involved in politically motivated uprisings. Now that he has achieved what he has fought for, he is unemployed and everything around him seems to fall to pieces. His whole family falls victim to the changes of the early 90s. His daughter prostitutes herself, his elder son ends up in prison and his younger son becomes a thief.
A medic is hunted by guilt of killing a man in a car accident, a cop who staged an experiment of placing a dummy on the side of the road and a dead man found found on the side of the road.
Based on a theatrical text by Romanian writer Ion Luca Caragiale (1852-1912), who was a bitter and funny witness of the turn-of-the-20th-century Romanian bourgeois mores, Carnival Scenes manages to preserve and further enhance the slightly hysteric atmosphere of his plays. Pintilie creates a strange combination of carnival scenes which is brought to the screen as a burlesque, fast-paced, screwball comedy with a meditative undertone. This film was banned in Romania for a decade until the death of Ceausescu in 1989 and was only released after the 1989 revolution.
During the summer of 1944, while Romanians turn weapons against Nazis, Mihai, an orphan teenager whose parents died in a bombing, tries to enlist in order to fight in the front line but he discovers that former police commissioner Potra tortured and beaten prisoners, including his father, who was political detained. Mihai will fight to bring Potra in front of the justice.
A police officer is investigating the disappearance of a colleague's young boy. His key seems to be the "dark skinned" friend of the boy about whom nobody cares, including the police.
An ex-convict struggles to survive by brute force alone in a turn-of-the-century slum in Bucharest. Codine is the thug who served 10 years for murdering a friend. He returns home to his miserly mother, whose penny-pinching ways infuriate her son. A young boy looks up to Codine, and through the man's eyes he sees the economic and social injustices from an adult perspective. When Codine kills another man who violated his trust, his mother becomes more unhinged and paranoid. Thinking her son will steal her hoarded money, she plots to kill her only son. The impressionable child watches in horror and amazement at the cruel machinations of the adult work that surrounds him.
An aspiring astronaut prepares his ship for take-off, plugs in a razor and causes a blackout. In the deep darkness the boy imagines himself meeting the literary characters who have enthralled readers past with their stories of space travel.