Teacher and novelist François Bégaudeau plays a version of himself as he negotiates a year with his racially mixed students from a tough Parisian neighborhood.
Lorna is a young Albanian woman in a marriage of convenience with Claudy, a heroin addict. Just as Lorna is about to be granted Belgian citizenship, Claudy finds the strength to detox; this presents a problem not only for Lorna, but for the criminal who brokered the deal.
A lonely woman's prank phone call leads to an unexpected friendship with a grieving widow.
A school teacher discusses types of government with his class. His students find it too boring to repeatedly go over national socialism and believe that dictatorship cannot be established in modern Germany. He starts an experiment to show how easily the masses can become manipulated.
A God-fearing bluesman takes to a wild young woman who, as a victim of childhood sexual abuse, is looking everywhere for love, but never quite finding it.
Jerry (Jamie Draven) was an idealist when he served in the first Gulf War. But when he was later deployed to Iraq, Jerry was an older man, a father of three and embittered by broken promises and unfulfilled desires. When Jerry returns from Iraq he has been transformed by horrors that cannot be forgiven. He lives a life of poverty, his children afraid of him and his wife, Nora (Vinessa Shaw), unsympathetic and unhappy. When Jerry discovers that Nora has betrayed him, his anger and despair drive him to commit an act so heinous and irreversible that nothing he had experienced in combat could have prepared him for.
In the middle of the Los Angeles ghetto, drugs, robberies and shootings dominate everyday life. During these times, Furious tries to raise his son Tre to be a decent person. Tre's friends, on the other hand, have little regard for the law and drag the entire neighborhood into a street war...
The family of a wealthy businessman gather to celebrate his 60th birthday. During the course of the party, his eldest son presents a speech that reveals a shocking secret.
A single mother suffers a devastating stroke leaving her teenage daughter and 7-year-old son to care for her, testing the family's strength to hold things together as their roles are reversed.
Laila Lives in a fake eastern society where all women should wear a veil and the only way of marriage is to be selected by a man, she refuses this tradition and gets involved in a forbidden love story.
Fulfilling her work as a bailiff in Salvador, Íris delivers warrants and is often forced to execute orders that go directly against what she believes in. The job torments her. One day, with the disappearance of an activist after the execution of a warrant issued by her, the officer begins to investigate the crime and finds herself involved in the discovery of a large land grabbing scheme.
Several ordinary high school students go through their daily routine as two others prepare for something more malevolent.
A young teacher inspires her class of at-risk students to learn tolerance, apply themselves, and pursue education beyond high school.
Various experiences of childhood are seen in several sequences that take place in the small town of Thiers, France. Vignettes include a boy's awakening interest in girls, couples double-dating at the movies, brothers giving their friend a haircut, a boy dealing with an abusive home life, a baby and a cat sitting by an open window, a child telling a dirty joke, and a boy who develops a crush on his friend's mother.
Desperate for clients, Isabelle, the owner of a small bookstore, accepts the offer to teach Caetano, an elderly illiterate man, how to read. The lessons turn into conversations about life and the history about their lives, even with contrasting experiences and opportunities. She begins to see in the lessons and in the closeness with her student a vocation never explored before.
Sophie Jacobs is going through the most difficult time of her life. Now, she just has to find out if it's real.
Second-hand car sales man Willenbrock has everything that he could ever wish for. He is married, has two lovers, a cottage in the German city Grünen, and a BMW. Yet one day while at his cottage he gets mugged and his life is drastically changed. Little by little the world he once felt safe in falls apart around him.
A woman’s lover and her ex-boyfriend take justice into their own hands after she becomes the victim of a rapist. Because some acts can’t be undone. Because man is an animal. Because the desire for vengeance is a natural impulse. Because most crimes remain unpunished.
Farhad, a respected math teacher, is engaged to the mother of one of his pupils. But rather than embrace his new father figure, the angry young student spends his days riding around Tehran on a motorcycle with his rebellious friend, refusing to study—or even sit—for his big final exam.
Photographers Brooke Konrad and Tanner Behlman travel to rural, abandoned buildings to capture the inherent beauty of long-forgotten locations, but far from forgotten are the traumatic memories that surface in Brooke when they meet The Man Upstairs, an unsuspecting squatter. As tensions and uncertainties arise, Brooke must determine if this mysterious stranger will provide her the closure she so desperately seeks or let the fears of the past consume her.