Two unfortunate friends are desperately looking for a job to survive and eventually marry their loved ones.
Borinage left Henri Storck profoundly disturbed by injustice and social poverty. When he was offered a chance to make the film he undertook an in-depth survey into the working class and slums and shouldered his camera as a militant filmmaker. In a plot of Walloon slums he staged characters and situations as examples. All shots work on intensity, the filling of the frame, which gives the impression of being unable to breathe, of being trapped, closed in. And in the face of this overflowing misery is the emptiness of the expressions, the absence of emotion. Survival is all. But the message of hope is there, with the destruction of slums (the hovels are demolished as if getting rid of a tyrant) and the construction of garden cities surrounded by trees in bloom and a future of song, leaves one with the impression that man’s dignity has been safeguarded.
A struggling Liberian rubber plantation worker risks everything to discover a new life as a Yellow Cab driver in New York City.
A young man eagerly prepares for triumph as a boxer in a neighborhood gym with the firm intention of escaping poverty to marry his girlfriend, who sings in a nightclub.
A story of love, sex and teen pregnancy in San Antonio, Texas. Petting Zoo is the portrait of a young woman coming into her own, in an environment that does not always present ideal circumstances.
The true story of the relationship between Alan Bennett and the singular Miss Shepherd, a woman of uncertain origins who ‘temporarily’ parked her van in Bennett’s London driveway and proceeded to live there for 15 years.
A single mother struggles to pay the rent and put food on the table for her 10 year old son.
Childhood trauma and religious repression causes little boy to grow up and murder .
Dario, a young lower-class, graduated from a management training academy is convinced to be prepared to achieve fortune. In search of a job, he gets involved in illegal businesses.
A community of people rejected by society live in an abandoned residence located in a "Medina": an old town in Tunisia. Al Bab, a local criminal running the residence's prostitution circle, returns from prison on his wedding day. Fraj, his brother and the town warlock, falls in love with Ramla, his brother's future wife: He is the only man of the residence who has seen her face, as she is kept prisoner in one of the rooms until the wedding night.
The microcosmic world of a street market on the outskirts of Zagreb: traders, thieves, prostitutes, self-appointed security guards and other lost souls, each with their own unique ideas, passion or mania. We follow the tragicomic, mutually intertwined mini dramas of each character, as they fight to save the marketplace itself, when city planners threaten to raze it to the ground and replace it with a skyscraper.
A big-city female doctor returns to her roots in the backwoods of the Blue Ridge Mountains to bring modern medicine to the local folks in the Appalachia of the 1930s and finds herself at odds with the homespun ways of the resident medicine woman.
Adonai Flores, an experienced writer of telenovelas, falls in love with Belén Helena, a girl of low class. Adonay, desperate to keep her with him, abandons his responsibilities and even his dog. After discovering that she is a drug dealer he decides to leave her and recovers his dog
This is a tale that has an epic scope in scenery "the northern snow-covered lands of coastal Norway" and is dramatized by moments of tumultuous stormy weather. But the focus is on Heikki (Stein Bjorn) a young man who is inspired by the northern lights to take a horse-drawn sled and make his way to the sea, hoping to come back with abundant fish. He is overtaken by a snowstorm and is forced to find shelter in a small, isolated cabin that is home to a half-crazy widow, her baby, and a blind man. Driven to arson by her internal demons, the woman destroys the cabin. She and the blind man perish, but Heikki manages to save the baby. He is now faced with an even greater challenge as he holds the infant and looks in the direction of the coastline.
In a forgotten pocket of Southern Ohio where American manufacturing and opportunity are drying up, a determined young woman finds a ticket out when she is accepted to college. Alongside her older brother, Ruth Avery joins a dangerous scrap metal crew in order to pay her way. Together, they spend one brutal winter working the scrap yards during the day and stealing valuable metal from the once thriving factories by night. With her goal in sight, Ruth finds that the ultimate cost of an education for a girl like her may be more than she bargained for, and she soon finds herself torn between a promising future and the family she would leave behind.
Tara is denied electricity bill support by Social Services, who tells her to simply get a free grill instead - a task that leads Tara into uncomfortable situations. Inspired by true events, "Grill" offers a satirical look at how a rich country in Scandinavia deals with poverty.
On reaching the capital, Pedro Gonzalez gets a lowly job and marries Margaret. After losing that job, get a new one as a bodyguard but is fired again. With so much poverty and despair Pedro believes that his only way out is suicide.
Mercedes works as a cabaret performer to pay for her sister's studies. Problems begin when Mercedes and Paco, her exploiter, win a dance contest, but he refuses to share the prize with her.
A poor man becomes a modern Robin Hood, robbing the rich to give to the poor.
A nightclub performer decides to raise the baby boy she found abandoned in a trash can, putting her job and social life in jeopardy.