Four vignettes on the lives of the Cuban people in the pre-revolutionary era. In Havana, Maria is ashamed when a man she loves discovers how she makes a living. Pedro, an old farmer, discovers that the land he cultivates is being sold to an American company. A student sees his friends attacked by the police while they distribute leaflets supporting Fidel Castro. Finally, a peasant family is threatened by Batista's army.

A psychologist is sent to a space station orbiting a planet called Solaris to investigate the death of a doctor and the mental problems of cosmonauts on the station. He soon discovers that the water on the planet is a type of brain which brings out repressed memories and obsessions.

The invasion of a village in Byelorussia by German forces sends young Florya into the forest to join the weary Resistance fighters, against his family's wishes. There he meets a girl, Glasha, who accompanies him back to his village. On returning home, Florya finds his family and fellow peasants massacred. His continued survival amidst the brutal debris of war becomes increasingly nightmarish, a battle between despair and hope.

1961 film by Andrei Tarkovsky

The story about an everyman who one morning suddenly leaps out on the courtyard and bludgeons two conversing housewives to death with a frying pan.