Two families attempt a daredevil plan to escape the GDR with a homemade hot air balloon, but it crashes just before the border. The Stasi finds traces of this attempt to escape and immediately starts investigations, while the two families are forced to build a new escape balloon. With each passing day the Stasi is closer on their heels – a nerve-wracking race against time begins.
France, World War II. In order to somehow make ends meet, the mother of two children, Marie Latour, does underground abortions and rents a room to a familiar prostitute. She doesn't pay any attention to her husband, who returned from the war because of his injury, and lives her own life. Abortions gradually begin to bring a good income, and boredom can be easily dispelled by starting up with a young lover.
Wanda, a dominatrix who runs an S&M gallery on the Hamburg waterfront, must choose between her lesbian lover and an American trainee.
When gambling addict Michele moves in with her childhood friend Janine, their teenaged daughter’s burgeoning friendship produces both humorous and heartbreaking results.
A young woman is falsely convicted of a bank robbery and sent to a maximum-security prison run by a corrupt warden, where she is forced to suffer various indignities.
Macabéa has just moved to the big city after her aunt, who raised her, died. She gets a job as a typist and moves into a boarding house with three other women. In her spare time, she listens to a radio station called Time; on Sundays, she likes to ride the metro. Then she meets Olímpico, a northeasterner like herself, who has dreams of becoming a congressman.
A recently divorced man and an emotionally devastated widow begin a love affair.
The Honors
Franziska received 21 letters after her contact ad from a certain Fabian Stiller. The Munich waitress only finds out that his real name was Florian Haugk when her admirer is found dead.
A high-powered New York publicist finds herself in Montana promoting a charity calendar after being betrayed by her boss and fiancé. Unfortunately, matters of the heart are just as complicated in the wilds as they are in the big city.
Just after losing her husband to a similar condition, Dr Anne Turner is diagnosed with a fatal neurological condition. So she plans to end her life herself. Based on a true story.
In the hilltops of Burundi, a group of escaped coltan miners form an anti-colonialist computer hacker collective. From their camp in an otherworldly e-waste dump, they attempt a takeover of the authoritarian regime exploiting the region's natural resources – and its people. When an intersex runaway and an escaped coltan miner find each other through cosmic forces, their connection sparks glitches within the greater divine circuitry.
Thymian Henning, an innocent young girl, is raped by the clerk of her father's pharmacy. She becomes pregnant, is rejected by her family, and must fend for herself in a harsh, cruel world.
Franziska sees police recovering a dead body and recognizes the woman as the one who had her make-up done by Franzika only days before. The hobby-detective suspects foul-play and starts investigating the self-help group for singles the dead woman was a part of.
Franziska Luginsland protects the girl Jolanda from the police and helps him to find his mother.
In New York, detective Alex Scott is investigating with his partner Sergio Perez the disappearance of several children. When they visit the Mexican witch Gloria, the woman advises that a powerful evil force is chasing the reincarnation of her son and drowning the other children to bring pain to their mothers.
20 short films about human rights.
Odette is a 8-yr-old girl who loves to dance and draw. Once she has become an adult, Odette realizes she was abused, and immerses herself body and soul in her career as a dancer while trying to deal with her past.
While confronting the disapproving father of his girlfriend Lola, Native American man Willie Boy kills the man in self-defense, triggering a massive manhunt, led by Deputy Sheriff Christopher Cooper.
At the age of forty Dame Margot Fonteyn is considered to be past her best as a prima ballerina and Ninette de Valois is reducing her roles at the Royal Ballet. Then the exciting young Russian dancer Rudolf Nureyev, a recent defector to the West, comes into her life and her bed and revitalizes her career. Frederick Aashton creates a new ballet for them and they become the golden couple of the ballet world. However, Margot is married to Roberto 'Tito' Arias, a Panamanian politician of dubious repute who is not sympathetic to her calling and is probably faithless. When he is shot and paralyzed for life Margot must carry on dancing well into her sixties in order to pay for his costly treatment though she still collaborates with Rudolf in the occasional ballet.