Due to misunderstanding and hard life, a man divorces his wife and leaves the city. He comes to a new environment, meeting new people and new wife. Crucified between two worlds, he does everything to bring her two sons on the right track, and getting on with his own life. Lost in that space, powerless to change things significantly, he commits murder.

A group of people go on a picnic in the mountains. Longing for some love and understanding, they try to get close to one another, but the barriers are insurmountable. Failing to pull through their nutshells of solitude, they get back to the city, the eternal desert.

Upon returning home at war's end, a young lieutenant discovers that his family has been murdered by the Nazis. It's all the handiwork of a treasonous "Chetnik," who during the war worked against the partisans on behalf of the Germans. In bitter retaliation, the lieutenant sets about to decimate the Chetnik's family. He stops short, however, when he realizes that the sins of the fathers are not always passed down to the innocent children.

Lado Tajovic, a student, is charged by the communist party to go to his home in the Montenegrin Mountains, to illegally spread the liberation movement's propaganda. Alone, surrounded by enemies, always awake and ready to evade traps and ambushes, Lado fights on the verge of sleep, against people which are cowards ready to betrayal. He fights his own temptations, hallucinations that constantly besiege him. Although he perseveres in holding to party directives: no killing and no revenge, Lado at one moment of weakness falls to a primal human act vengeance.