A young schoolteacher descends into personal moral degradation after finding himself stranded in a brutal, menacing town in outback Australia.
Elijah has been bounced from group home to group home throughout his turbulent young life. What has sustained him is his art. After a promised scholarship is taken away, Elijah ends up in a fight that result in the death of another boy. Now, sentenced to a minimum of fifteen years, the young man must find a way to keep his soul alive behind bars or turn into a hardened bitter criminal.
Following her parents' wishes, spirited seventeen-year-old Effi Briest marries Baron von Innstetten – a former admirer of her mother – who is twenty years Effi's senior. This marriage of prudence heralds the beginning of a humdrum life, far from home, for Effi. Innstetten devotes himself entirely to his political career, and the sleepy small town of Kessin has very little to offer in terms of variety. But then, one day, Innstetten's old regimental comrade, Major Crampas – a charming womanizer – arrives on the scene.
Wolfgang is an apprentice at a car repair shop and is in financial trouble; he urgently needs 200 marks. Completely desperate, he calls the telephone counseling service. At first, he does not want to reveal the reason for his predicament, but then he confesses that he has been secretly “borrowing” cars from the repair shop for months.
Madeline has become an integral part of a prestigious physical theater troupe. When the workshop's ambitious director pushes the teenager to weave her rich interior world and troubled history with her mother into their collective art, the lines between performance and reality begin to blur. The resulting battle between imagination and appropriation rips out of the rehearsal space and through all three women's lives.
A high school princess is cursed by the geek whose affections she toyed with.
Robert Dupea spends his days doing various odd jobs, drinking and womanizing until an encounter with his sister makes him revisit his past.
Two girls from different backgrounds, one an immigrant from Turkey and the other a girl who needs to get out of her father's shadow, apply to the police academy, where they become close friends.
A concentration camp survivor discovers her former torturer and lover working as a porter at a hotel in postwar Vienna. When the couple attempt to re-create their sadomasochistic relationship, his former SS comrades begin to stalk them.
Following political upheaval, traditionally poor countries have stopped exporting raw materials. The Western world is entering an economic crisis, which is rapidly spreading to Norway. Unemployment rises sharply, and it becomes more difficult to obtain food. The government does not officially acknowledge the crisis, but fear spreads among the population. Demonstrations between the population and the police are now a daily occurrence. Thomas and Vera are also unemployed. The only way out of their predicament is to move out of the city and rent an abandoned farm. The sale of food is banned. Military forces arrive to confiscate what little they have. Later, the city population follows, traveling to the countryside in panic to secure something to eat.
Heavily pregnant Natalie 18 (bolshie and brash) still parties hard with best mate Mel. Homayra 60's (Middle eastern and proud) lives next door and cares for ailing husband Sully. She's sick of Natalie and her friends, their racist comments and loud music. However one night, events change the course of the two women's lives forever and bring forth an unlikely union.
Courtenay John Dayre is drugged by a jealous spy on the night before his loveless marriage to Anthea. His twin, John Courtenay Dayre, reluctantly agrees to impersonate his brother at the wedding, only to discover a genuine affection for his accidental wife. Meanwhile, Courtenay begins to understand the price of things when he realises that his affair has allowed a valuable military secret to be stolen.
"What if someone wrote your biography? Would there be horns and halos involved?"
While celebrating their reconciliation and six years of marriage, American actress Sally Nash and British novelist Joe Therrian receive their close friends, some colleagues and their next door neighbors in a party. Under the effect of Ecstasy, revelations are disclosed and relationships deteriorate among the group.
A worker at a Russian nuclear facility gets exposed to a lethal dose of radiation. In order to provide for his family, he steals some plutonium and sets out to sell it on Moscow's black market with the help of an incompetent criminal.
Soon to be a father, Mark feels the pressure of domestic responsibility closing in, so he is more than happy to accept when his old friend Kurt proposes a camping trip in the Oregon wilderness. During their time together, the men come to grips with the changes in their lives and the effect on their relationship.
Young Jeremiah lives in a stable environment with loving foster parents until the day his troubled mother, Sarah, returns to claim him. Jeremiah becomes swept up in his mother's dangerous world of drugs, seedy hotels, strip joints and revolving lovers. Salvation comes in the form of the boy's ultrareligious grandparents, but soon Jeremiah's mother returns. Maternal love binds the pair together on the road until Sarah's desperate and depraved lifestyle finally consumes her.
Following a nervous breakdown, ski athlete Jomar has isolated himself in a lonely existence as the guard of a ski park. When he learns that he might be the father of a child way up north, he sets on a strange and poetic journey through Norway on a snowmobile, with 5 liters of alcohol as sole provisions. On this trip through amazing arctic landscapes, Jomar seems to do everything in his power to avoid reaching his destination. He meets other tender and confused souls, who will all contribute to push Jomar further along his reluctant journey towards the brighter side of life.
Kaisa is a Scot, a successful London lawyer, who snorts coke and has one-night stands with strangers. Her mother calls from Aberdeen with some story begging her to fly to Norway and collect her alcoholic dad whom she hasn't seen in years.
It's a sweltering summer, but Jung-won, a terminally ill, thirty-something photographer, is already in the winter of his life when he begins a tentative romance with a young traffic cop who doesn't know about his condition. Is their relationship doomed before it even begins?