An unsentimental Hungarian film about the edgy relationship between a middle-aged woman and her young, restless daughter-in-law when the son-husband goes to sea for six months.

A continuation of "Diary for My Children," the film picks up in 1950, when Juli, the diarist, is 18 and determined to become a movie director.

The young Valkó wants to plan a block of apartments that will still be modern fifty years from now. His ambitious plans are continuously rejected by his manipulative and careless superiors. So instead of the modern block of flats he only plans a bachelor apartment.

A Budapest high school in the beginning of the 1960s. Dini suffers the torments of adolescence. His father had to leave Hungary after the uprise in 1956, and since then Dini's mother has had to take care of her two sons on her own. A friend of Dini’s father, Bodor, is released from prison and moves in with them. Dini and his brother are far from happy about this intrusion on their family life.

September 1938. Tenants of a Budapest block of flats live their everyday lives, conducted by tradition. World politics does not divide them. Their major experience is the private life of the actress in the house.

Péter and Pál, two notorious skirt hunters competing in wooing Oana, a pretty Romanian girl on the beach at Tihany. A couple of days later the girl gets a telegram saying that she has to leave for Bucharest immediately. The party - which has increased with Piri, the interpreter, and Ági, the hitch-hiker - gets to a Romanian village by Peter's ramshackle car, a 1921 Colymne. The car, however, breaks down.

Emilia Odor is a young, seventeen year old girl. She end up in a rural girl institute, which has strict rules, a hypocrite faculty and she soon starts to rebel against it. Her schoolmates support her until then the manager announce a competition among the students: the most deserving student will participant in the millenial festival in Budapest.

The family travels to Zebegény for their holiday, and the following day the seventeen-year-old Vera also leaves for Lake Balaton to pick peaches in a voluntary camp there. Her boyfriend, Gyuri, goes to a film shooting. Gyuri would like to make the best of the day in the absence of parents, but Vera refuses him. She becomes jealous at once, however, when she discovers Gyuri's previous girlfriend in the shooting team.

It is a tragedy, set among low-lifes on the outskirts of Budapest. Dramatic Exchange describes it as "Widely considered to be the most important Hungarian play of the last 20 years". The odd title of the play refers in the first instance to the chicken heads that an old woman feeds to her cat. However, it can also be taken to refer more broadly to the obtuse behaviour of the main characters in the play. The play is an odd mixture of pathos and nihilism, written against the bleak background of Stalinist totalitarianism from which Hungary was emerging. As with much modern drama, there is no hero in the play. The only noble behaviour that one can find belongs to one of the characters in the past, when he was a child, but he is no longer as he was. The hint that what once existed might be achieved again is the only faint ray of hope in a very bleak view of the human condition.

The film describes the general situation and conditions of the middle-aged intellectuals.

After a tax inspection Sándor Radó, manager of a cartographic institute in Geneva called Geopress suddenly finds himself at the police station, where they withdraw his residence permit. This pestering makes him nervous, because cartography actually covers for a much more important activity: he is the head of the Soviet intelligence group in Switzerland.