Left penniless by her vengeful ex-husband, Madeline is forced to become a pickpocket to pay for a new wardrobe. One of her victims is a Mr. Finlay, who threatens to turn her over to the police -- until he hears Madeline's woeful tale of her cruel, possessive husband.
A near-penniless drifter's journey to Alaska in search of work is interrupted when she loses her dog while attempting to shoplift food for it.
A lottery win of $5,000 forever changes the lives of a miner turned dentist and his wife.
Clyde and Levi prepare for life after high school. Twists and turns allows for them to encounter adversaries that test their friendship, their strength, and the power to go on. We see how they are individually affected as a result of their poverty, drug, and crime stricken backgrounds which will give them the option to either become a product of their environments or products of themselves.
In this loose adaptation of Shakespeare's "Henry IV," Mike Waters is a hustler afflicted with narcolepsy. Scott Favor is the rebellious son of a mayor. Together, the two travel from Portland, Oregon to Idaho and finally to the coast of Italy in a quest to find Mike's estranged mother. Along the way they turn tricks for money and drugs, eventually attracting the attention of a wealthy benefactor and sexual deviant.
An emotionally scarred highway drifter shoots a sadistic trick who rapes her, and ultimately becomes America's first female serial killer.
A man tries to raise his two sons and two daughters under some of the most adverse conditions known to man. The father operates a horse-drawn cart, but in a city that is modernizing after the destruction of the Korean War, automobiles are making carts obsolete. The children are experiencing difficulties as well. The eldest son has flunked the bar exam twice and is not hopeful of passing it a third time to become a lawyer. The eldest daughter is mute and married to an abusive husband. The younger daughter tries to pose as a rich university student to move up in life. The youngest son has a penchant for petty theft.
In the late 19th century, two Swedish emigrants, Lasse Karlsson and his son Pelle, arrive on the Danish island of Bornholm hoping to find work on a farm and save enough money to travel to the United States of America.
In Tokyo, a girl and her boyfriend spend a night talking about their life, their precarious condition and their difficulties to earn a living, their place in the world, if ever they have one...
The Chemos and the Pachecos are two gangs whose adventures are witnessed by the doctor, the assistant and the social worker of a clinic where they know of the young men's problems.
Billy is the self-designated leader of a group of teenagers living in a shelter. Jacob and Rae, Billy's oldest childhood friends, live there as well as part of "the family". Billy has an AIDs-like virus, which he has passed on to his blood brother Jacob. Billy and Rae are boyfriend and girlfriend, much to the dismay of Jacob who has always loved Rae from afar. Billy's philosophy of life, and how that interfaces with having a deadly virus, comes to a head when Billy and Jacob compete in a very unique game of "Tag", with the future of Rae and "the family" dependent upon the outcome.
In 1916, a Chicago steel worker accidentally kills his supervisor and flees to the Texas panhandle with his girlfriend and little sister to work harvesting wheat in the fields of a stoic farmer.
Kaj is a stubborn man with a great deal of pride. The former chef lives in a council flat. He has wasted his life and is now on a council job training scheme for the long-term unemployed, where he refuses to let the foreman of the activation project boss him about. When Kaj's daughter, with whom he has not been in touch for nineteen years, moves into the same council estate on the run from her violent husband, a change comes over Kaj. His initial instinct is to avoid her, but by chance he ends up helping to look after Jonas, her six-year-old son. For the first time for years Kaj need not survive on his own devices. Now he has responsibilities and a family of his own.
As a family of siblings and their spouses gathers at their father's deathbed, old jealousies and new angers and liaisons lead to an inevitable climax.
A poor construction worker, who struggles to keep his son in private school, mistakes an orb he finds in a junkjard for a toy which proves to be much, much more once the young boy starts to play with it.
Gisela
A young man befriends the last surviving Civil War veteran, intending to rob him of $50,000.
An Irish Catholic family returns to 1930s Limerick after a child's death in America. The unemployed I.R.A. veteran father struggles with poverty, prejudice, and alcoholism as the family endures harsh slum conditions.
A pimp with no other means to provide for himself finds his life spiralling out of control when his prostitute is sent to prison.
A Peruvian teen lusts after his wild sister while the new wife of their difficult, wealthy father tries to hide her lower-class background.