"Historia kina w Popielawach" is a bucolic familiar tale, full of irony and heavily intertwined with the invention of the motion picture. The narrator is a boy of ten years, during the sixties, traveling from town to visit the village of his grandfather, Popielawy. About a hundred years ago - nearly a quarter of a century before Edison and the Lumiere brothers - the village blacksmith invented a cinematic apparatus with which he was able to project images drawn in the bladders of fish and pigs, making them "come alive". One hundred years later, the great grandson of a blacksmith Szustek is determined to rebuild the machine from its ancestor, despite the opposition of his father.
Gas station owner, Lasse, spends most of his time rebuilding his old Tiger Moth aeroplane and dreams of one day flying it through the air. He barely notices the strange stories that focuses around his station in the 24 hours before Election Day. A man gets a nasty surprise as he leaves his family in the car to enjoy a quick skinny dip. A cow eats a mobile phone. A lesbian couple looses their child. A blind girl and her brother sells dubious lottery tickets. A boy falls in love with the girl at the gas station.
The film is set just before Poland's communist regime came to an end, and the central character is a provincial censor (Janusz Gajos), a tired, sloppy, lonely man, whose wife has long since left him. For him, censorship is both an art and a game, but he does not enjoy it. During a screening of a sentimental Polish melodrama called "Daybreak" at the Liberty cinema across the road from the censor's office, the actors start to rebel and refuse to speak their lines.
Arvid is a regular bank clerk, whose life changes radically when he knocks out the bank robber Franz with his squash racket. A few days later Franz's wife visits him lamenting that she needed the swag for an IVF. To obtain the money Arvid and his criminal brother Harald plan a thievery, which ends bloodily and drags them into real trouble.