One winter night, Pilar runs away from home. With her, she takes only a few belongings and her son, Juan. Antonio soon sets out to look for her. He says Pilar is his sunshine, and what's more, "She gave him her eyes"...
A single middle-aged man trapped in frustration and loneliness in Toronto communicates with a divorced woman, and they help from thousands of miles apart. Dhruv lives a lonely life in Toronto, Canada. He is a forty-year-old student who has discontinued his education and gets by working odd jobs. Sheema is the sister of Dhruv's brother-in-law, looking for someone to take care of her apartment while she and her son return home to visit Bangladesh for a few months. Dhruv, never having met Sheema, agrees to house-sit. Communicating over the phone, they develop a friendship and help each other to solve problems related to the cultural challenges of being Bangladeshi immigrants to Canada.
Die Polizistin is a drama by Andreas Dresen about the life of a young police woman who is faced with the difficulties between her responsibilities at work and her personal responsibilities.
Kuhle Wampe takes place in early-1930s Berlin. The film begins with a montage of newspaper headlines describing steadily-rising unemployment figures. This is followed by scenes of a young man looking for work in the city and the family discussing the unpaid back rent. The young man, brother of the protagonist Anni, removes his wristwatch and throws himself from a window out of despair. Shortly thereafter his family is evicted from their apartment. Now homeless, the family moves into a garden colony of sorts with the name “Kuhle Wampe.”
Marseille. The director of a company offers a promotion to Francois (Michel Creton) if he accepts to help him fire all the staff from his office. If he refuses, he will himself be fired. Francois opts for the latter. He registers as unemployed and discovers what he has lacked so far in his life: a certain freedom. His habits are changing as well as his attitude towards the others changes ... Luce (Claude Jade), his wife, and Marquerite (Courtois Queen), her stepmother, are surprised: why he is not himself anymore?
"Año cero" is about the well-educated, well-to-do middle-class man, Miguel who loses his job. Now he finds himself without direction, credentials or long-term relationships.
Three friends reunite in Athens after struggling abroad. They think of a business idea but quickly realise that not everything goes as planned. When they reach out to a lawyer friend for help, they find that we are all on our own.
From the youth directed novel of the same name by Greogor Tressnow comes a film by Detlev Buck that is a realistic portrait of life in the section of Berlin called Neukölln. It’s about power and weakness, delinquents and victims, and the difficulties a 15-year-old faces in a poor and criminal environment.
A drama about a Maori family living in Auckland, New Zealand. Lee Tamahori tells the story of Beth Heke’s strong will to keep her family together during times of unemployment and abuse from her violent and alcoholic husband.
In a Japan of the near future, the government program Plan 75 encourages senior citizens to be voluntarily euthanized to remedy a super-aged society. An elderly woman whose means of survival are vanishing, a pragmatic Plan 75 salesman, and a young Filipino laborer face choices of life and death.
Two childhood friends are recruited for a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv.
An advertising man is slowly sliding downhill. When he is fired from his job in Detroit, he signs up for unemployment. One day they find him a job: teaching thinking skills to Army recruits. He arrives on base to find that there is no structure set up for the class.
In a working-class quarter of Dublin, 'Bimbo' Reeves gets laid off from his job and, with his redundancy payout, buys a van and sells fish and chips with his buddy, Larry. Due to Ireland's surprising success at the 1990 FIFA World Cup, their business starts off well, but the relationship between the two friends soon becomes strained as Bimbo behaves more like a typical boss.
A wayward youth of a rich father, Jomon is a carefree youngster who doesn’t care about ‘being responsible enough’ for his age. When the family lands in a financial soup out of the blue, a different side of the youngster surprisingly emerges.
When a promised job for Texan Michael fails to materialize in Wyoming, Mike is mistaken by Wayne to be the hitman he hired to kill his unfaithful wife, Suzanne. Mike takes full advantage of the situation, collects the money, and runs. During his getaway, things go wrong, and soon get worse when he runs into the real hitman, Lyle.
This drama centers on Hank Chinaski, the fictional alter-ego of "Factotum" author Charles Bukowski, who wanders around Los Angeles, CA trying to live off jobs which don't interfere with his primary interest, which is writing. Along the way, he fends off the distractions offered by women, drinking and gambling.
When a man is diagnosed with terminal cancer, he takes custody of his misanthropic teenage son, for whom quality time means getting high, engaging in small-time prostitution, and avoiding his father.
Young, impulsive Rosetta lives a hard and stressful life as she struggles to support herself and her alcoholic mother. Refusing all charity, she is desperate to maintain a dignified job.
Mark Wingett stars as Slaughterman - in Award winning Actress Wendy Morgan's debut film introducing Maria Austin as MERCY - a factory farmed pig who bravely and touchingly takes us with her on her tragic journey as she leaves behind her own family and encounters those whose job it is to end her short violent life. As the world teeters on the precipice of ecological destruction, Mercy's story is at the heart of everything we are now and at the beginning of all that must change.
Follows the lives of an unemployed drunk and his son as they struggle to adapt to each other.