Petria's Wreath

Bullied at school and ignored and abused at home by his indifferent mother and older brother, Billy Casper, a 15-year-old working-class Yorkshire boy, tames and trains his pet kestrel falcon whom he names Kes. Helped and encouraged by his English teacher and his fellow students, Billy finally finds a positive purpose to his unhappy existence—until tragedy strikes.

The daughter of a Nevada casino owner gets involved with a racketeer, despite everyone's efforts to separate them.

A schoolteacher, stuck in a teaching post in an arid backwater, stops off in a mining town on his way home for Christmas. Discovering a local gambling craze that may grant him the money to move back to Sydney for good, he embarks on a five-day nightmarish odyssey of drinking, gambling, and hunting.

Sophie, a quiet and shy maid working for an upper-class French family, finds a friend in the energetic and uncompromising postmaster Jeanne, who encourages her to stand up against her bourgeois employers.

The true story of the massacre of a small Czech village by the Nazis is retold as if it happened in Wales.

Set in Harlem in 1987, Claireece "Precious" Jones is a 16-year-old African American girl born into a life no one would want. She's pregnant for the second time by her absent father; at home, she must wait hand and foot on her mother, an angry woman who abuses her emotionally and physically. School is chaotic and Precious has reached the ninth grade with good marks and a secret; She can't read.

Young women in a small Japanese town look to revive their home's declining fortunes by building a Hawaiian village tourist attraction.

When a teacher reads an essay written by Morgan Evans, one of the boys, moved by his rough poetry she decides to hold classes in her house and believes that Morgan is smart enough to attend Oxford.

A man in his fifties reminisces about his childhood growing up in a Welsh mining village at the turn of the 20th century.

Three teenage brothers, gang-member Bobby, troubled mama's boy Alan and self-assured prankster Lex, reside in a downtrodden section of Glasgow, Scotland, circa 1968. But while Bobby and Alan are beginning to experience the power of raging hormones, the story focuses on Lex, who begins a downward spiral after he accidentally shoots the leader of Bobby's gang. Lex's cockiness and immaturity unfortunately prevent him from understanding the effect his subsequent crimes will have on both himself, and on those around him.

The true story of the life of Gavino Ledda, the son of a Sardinian shepherd, and how he managed to escape his harsh, almost barbaric existence by slowly educating himself, despite violent opposition from his brutal father.

The son of a working-class British mining family has dreams of pursuing an art career, but when he strikes up an affair with an older, married woman from the town it enrages his kind but possessive mother.

A man wanders into a seemingly deserted town with his young son in search of work. But after a bit of bad luck, he joins the town's population of lost souls.

A-yuan and A-yun are both from the small mining town of Jio-fen. They move to Taipei, where A-yuan is an apprentice by day and goes to night school, and A-yun works as a helper at a tailors. Everyone thinks they are meant for each other, and so do they. They fail to see time and fate are beyond their control.

A gambler and a prostitute become business partners in a remote Old West mining town, and their enterprise thrives until a large corporation arrives on the scene.

After being abandoned in the desert by his abusive stepfather, Phillip finds himself cruelly cast into a game of life or death until a beautiful orphan named Lucy and her boyfriend Jack come to his rescue. The three runaways patrol the desert and live as petty thieves, but they soon find that the fight for survival against nature may become a fight for survival against each other.

Growing up in the sheltered confines of a 1920's English coal-mining community, free-spirited sisters Gudrun and Ursula explore erotic love with a wealthy playboy and a philosophical educator, with cataclysmic results for all four.

A backwoods, illiterate young woman from Arkansas battles to regain custody of her son from her estranged husband who feels she is an unfit mother. In the process, she falls in love with a struggling musician who helps her cause.

Northern China, 2004. When miner Zhang Baomin returns to his home, a small and isolated mining village, his wife tells him that their son has mysteriously disappeared while shepherding his small flock.

Australia, 1958. When a nine year old white girl is found murdered, police are quick to arrest illiterate Aborigine, Max Stuart. Under interrogation Max admits to the killing. With a legal system compromised by intimidation tactics, the skills of his two gifted but naïve defense lawyers are put to the test.