Four friends travel to the Altai for a rafting trip on a mountain river. Cut off from civilization and face-to-face with nature at its wildest, the heroes are not able to relax but instead are forced to fight for survival. They ask for help from a group of seemingly ‘sportsmen-boaters’ they encounter on the river. But then the heroes realize that they have been taken hostage by criminals. All their weaknesses and faults are laid bare and their true selves are revealed.
A space pirate from the distant Barracuda galaxy, possessing amazing superpowers, comes to Earth. To escape the punishment of harsh cosmic law, the alien takes on the guise of a quiet schoolboy, Mitya, and begins searching for a repeater left on Earth in time immemorial to send a distress signal to his team. He accidentally saves the girl Kristina, who is being bullied by her classmates, and finds himself in the same company with the young hooligan and bully Kolya. Now their common task is not only to escape from their alien snake-people pursuers, but also to defuse a bomb that could destroy the entire solar system. But in order to save the Earth, you first have to understand that only friendship and self-sacrifice can resolve problems on a galactic scale.
During the day, Lera studies humankind and its needs through opinion polls, which are an educational practice at the institute; at night, she dances under the pseudonym Gerda in a club to support herself and her mother. The people she meets are as unfortunate as her family. Her father has recently left for another woman, but he constantly returns home, unable to make his choice and thereby making the life of close people intolerable. The mother painfully endures the breakup and constantly sleeps, ignoring reality. Lera doesn’t know how to carry on, where to go and what to live for, and — most importantly — how to improve life. The adult world, invariable unfortunate, which Lera observes day and night, seems hopeless.
In late nineteenth-century Yakutia, Habji and his wife Keremes have just buried their second child, and are preparing for a harsh winter of famine. Instead of giving them the help he promised, the local prince foists a Russian convict, Kostya, on the family, who the law decrees must live in the same house as them. They initially struggle to find a common language, and the convict soon decides that he will be the master of the house from now on.
Marina, once “burned” in matters of the heart, promises herself that she will never get married. And men will... only be “used.” She has a private hotel in the very center of St. Petersburg. With her exceptional beauty, Marina attracts many admirers to the hotel, without giving any of them the slightest hope of reciprocity. But one day, Konstantin Solomatin, a naval officer, captain of the first rank, and... an inveterate misogynist, stops at her hotel. He not only does not have loving feelings for our heroine, but also manages, in a fit of anger, to insult her by hinting that she leads the life of a kept woman. The wounded Marina decides to take revenge on the captain: to make him fall in love with her at all costs, and then make him suffer from unrequited love...
