The charming young man Ran is a director in a school in his hometown. His classmate Mariana is his wife. At the first glance, things are like, as they ought to be. In the world of untold words and timid gestures something important is missing - the understanding. He cannot succumb to the routine, hypocrisy and egoism. Ran sees every moment of his everyday life as a part of everlasting human strive for beauty and perfection, which brings him many troubles and causes conflicts with his colleagues and his friends. The intrigues and betrayal of a part of his colleagues during the visitation of a school inspector make him lose his patience. On a public place, he slaps the inspector who destroys the human dignity of the others. There is a court against Ran. He must leave the school. He leaves his wife Mariana who does not understand him. These misfortunes do not stop his search for real values, real work, real love, in another place, another town, another school.

The action centers on Ran and his schoolmates who are in the last year of school. They are only a few days away from the day when they will have to make a decisive choice: what are they going to be, and what is more important, how are they going to live? In the whirlpool of meetings with different people and mainly with three women, the filmmakers are trying to see the future of their main character. His schoolmate Mariana wants to lead him into family life. The pop singer Neli is the very incarnation of adventurism. However, he is most deeply touched by the salesgirl in the near-by coffee shop Tintyava. This is a wordless affair in which each glance exchanged betrays the piercing excitement of impossible love.

Maria is having great difficulty getting on with her parents because of their blind, consumerist approach to life. Traumatized by continuous family dramas, having experienced the disappointments of firs love, Maria decides to go up the mountain to a holiday home. There she meets a conceited architect, a shy teacher, a jurist, and a timid journalist (all of them representatives of the intelligentsia) who are domineered by the manager of the holiday home and his 'problems'. Maria's resignation changes into a rebellion against impersonal submission and sheep-like compliance with those who hold power.

Boris Morev dreams of money and power, he’ll do everything to reach the top, including leaving his beloved Irina, to marry the daughter of the local tobacco factory owner. With the death of his father-in-law and the illness of his wife, Morev becomes the new owner of "Nicotiana" and rules with an iron fist, resulting in massive labour strikes and murder. He ropes Irina back into his life, first as a mistress and later as his second wife, but his ambitions still come first as he plans on emerging as the biggest tobacco seller once the war is over. Irina’s love for Boris is fading and she finds a lover in one of the Germans Boris is trying to strike a deal with. Set against the backdrop of World War II and communist partisans fighting against the Nazi-allied Bulgarian monarchy, the film is a screen adaptation of the Bulgarian classic novel "Tobacco" released in 1954.

1967 film by Grisha Ostrovski, Todor Stoyanov