Viktor Kryuchkov

The movie intertwines the plot lines of the stories "In the Bathhouse", "Tears Invisible to the World", "A Conversation between a Man and a Dog" and others. By the will of the film's creators, the viewer gets to the rehearsals of an unusual choir and gets acquainted with the stories of the singers - diverse, but invariably amusing.

Afonya Borshev is a plumber who drinks a lot, flirts a lot and doesn't care too much about tomorrow. His wife left him, his boss placed him on probation, his whole life is falling apart, but he doesn't realize it. When Afonya met Katya at a dance club he didn't pay her much attention, yet she may be the only one who can help him.

Aboard a steamship, a priest tells his fellow passengers his life story, which he admits is the story of a great sinner.

The action takes place at the end of the 19th century in the Russian North, near the White Sea. Orphan Matvey is still 12 years old. His abilities are noticed by the master shipbuilder Quake and takes to his artel. While studying carpentry, Matvey saves money, dreaming of being a pilot on his own ship...

The parents of thirteen-year-old Andrei went on a six-month business trip abroad and rented an apartment to Nina Korableva, a kindergarten music teacher, to look after the boy. They became friends very quickly.

Sergey arrives in the town with his son to visit the old forest ranger. They share a long-standing acquaintance. A romance begins between the ranger’s daughter, Ksenia, and Sergey, but suddenly, Ksenia's ex-husband shows up...

The young lumberjack foreman Lyoshka Ignatov bitterly sees for himself that the huge stocks of forest, extracted by hard work, rot on the side of the road due to simple mismanagement. Raising the alarm at the timber industry farm and not receiving support in the area, he flies to Moscow.

The film comprises three cinematic novellas: (1) “And They Arrived at the Peasant’s Hut… or the Adventures of Writer Senya in Search of the Hidden Word,” in which writer Senya draws inspiration for his rural novels from his housekeeper Yermolayevna’s tales; (2) “The Song, or How the Great Louarsab Organized a Choir,” where a city visitor attempts to form a choir of centenarian elders in a Georgian mountain village; (3) “What Is Our Life?! or What Is Our Life?!”—during a musical reenactment of pre-Revolutionary France, a drunken actor’s tardiness forces King Louis XIV (also the theater committee chairman) and the cast to improvise the play’s ending.