Ogrodowa Street in Lódz - just opposite a crowded shopping center, a state-of-the-art museum and a posh hotel - is where some of the city's poorest live, completely forgotten by the world. A heart-warming and funny portrait of people excluded from the mainstream of social life; people who might be more capable of sacrifice and love than those who pushed them to the sidelines of society.

Jan and Maria become a couple in 1930s Kraków. Jan tries to get a job as an architect but fails. They struggle with poverty and extreme humiliation. Their attempt to survive leads to a desperate crime.

"The Dancing Hawk" refers to the son of a peasant who senses he can climb to the job in troubled times by playing his cards right. His slavery to work match his ambitions, and gradually he reaches the social position he desires. But the costs have included a dehumanized soul and a loss of a moral conscience. People have had to pay for his advancement, including those nearest to him. The downfall is equally painful: either imprisonment or the easy wasy out are offered as the alternatives.

A petty criminal and gambler, befriends a man who performs inspections of meat plants. His assistant suspects wrongdoings at the slaughterhouse.

Bronek Pekosinski lives in Zamosc, Poland. He is probably 83 years old. He has no family and does not really know who he is. Everything about his life is fictitious: symbolic is the date of birth – the day World War II broke out, as well as his surname – after PKOS, an abbreviation of a charitable institution, and the place of birth – the Nazi concentration camp, from where his mother threw him over a barbed wire fence. Even his friends and guardians turned out to be false. Only his loneliness and his hump seem to be authentic. Two great powers have vied for young Bronek’s soul: Roman-Catholic church and a totalitarian state. He fell into alcoholism. Partially paralyzed as the effect of cerebral hemorrhage, he is fired with an ambition of acquiring a mastery in a game of chess. And even though he is continuously humiliated and driven away, betrayed and victimized, he manages to retain his personal dignity and trustful nature of a small child. Throughout all his life Bronek has been searching for his mother.