Young Alisa is fed up with her life in Moscow, and moves to St. Petersburg. Her roommates in the collective flat are two junkies, Vel and her boyfriend Valera the Dead Man. First they fight, but soon the two women form a friendship. Together they even go after the Petersburg underworld when Dead Man is abducted because he can't pay his debts.
The fanciful tale of an introverted little girl who grows up believing she has the power to make wishes come true. She must reconcile this belief with reality when, as a young woman, she journeys to Moscow and grapples with love, modernity and materialism.
Blending dramatic situations with a documentary-influenced visual style, Happy Birthday looks in at a typical day in a Russian maternity hospital. The patients range from a middle aged woman pleased if surprised by her current pregnancy to a Muslim woman whose marriage to a Russian has blighted her relationship with her family. No matter what their situations, the women draw strength and support from each other as they share their common experience.
A mid-level manager who develops an aversion to being "good" finds himself confronting the mysteries of middle-age and morality as he loses grasp of what was once his quiet life.
Sisters Olga and Tatyana have long been living away from each other. Olga is in Moscow, and Tatyana remained at home - in a provincial town, but each tries to prove her case. And until the characters understand that the past is a bad adviser, the war in a single family will continue.
Ivan, a successful oncologist who has created a cure for cancer, discovers suddenly that by an ironical twist of fate he is terminally ill. He realizes that he has one chance to correct the mistake he made a long time ago, and leaves his family to go to another city to the woman he loved all his life, hoping to spend the last night with her...
Viktor spends his free time trawling bars with ladies of questionable repute, from where he is picked up by a wife he doesn’t love, the mother of a child they never planned. Viktor himself was abandoned by his own father, his mother then committed suicide, and he was left to grow up in an orphanage. Years later, his errant dad returns, now a disabled felon, and Viktor discovers a timely legacy is in the offing – his father’s apartment. The documentation for securing dad’s move into an old people’s home is signed in a flash. Nevertheless, the only one that can take him is miles away and, what’s more, the invalid starts to recuperate during the journey, which is when their real problems begin.
The 17-year-old Savva is getting ready to enrol at university. His parents go on vacation, conferring the responsibility for preparing the entrance exams onto the son. Savva finds a foreign literature teacher on the Internet site “Your Tutor”.
19 year old Wojtek lives in a poverty stricken Polish town. He is in love with an older woman, an illegal emigrant from Ukraine. He boxes in illegal matches to get money and is spotted by a man running a security business. Accepting this man's offer means becoming a gangster, but this could allow him to a residence permit for his girlfriend Katya.