Nina Elizarovna lives with her bed-ridden mother and her two daughters, Lida en Nastia, in a small three-room apartment in the big city. Four women, closely related yet very different from each other, united by fate and their fight for personal happiness. Nina has been married twice and each other daughters has a different father. Lida, the eldest daughter, has a relationship with a married colleague, Andrei Pavlovitch. Nastia, a student at the merchant school, is in love with the carefree Michka. Everything is simple, yet complicated. Andrei Pavlovitch turns out to be a selfish womaniser and the Nastia and Michka becomes difficult when her mother discovers that Nastia is pregnant. Then a shy and sympathetic man appears in the women’s lives and falls in love with Nina.Krishtofovich: ‘One day I understood what I could best do with my films: make people aware of the fact that they deserve a better life. And that is especially true of the people in my own country. I always thought that learning to understand a woman was one of man’s most valuable activities. To understand that women, as men generally assume, can cope with pain better than men, one has to realise that this doesn’t mean they don’t suffer. This is especially true in my country. In this film I didn’t only want to study life as we live it, but also to show how we manage to survive without losing our sense of dignity.’
