In a rural village in Thailand, Mak is sent to fight in a war and leaves his pregnant wife, Nak. Mak is injured and barely survives. He returns home to his doting wife and child, or so he thinks.
Fleeing heartbreak in the big city, Ichiko returns to Komori, her rural hometown. She battles summer's rain and humidity, bakes her own bread, grows hothouse tomatoes and tills the fields. During autumn, the time for pickling and preserving fish and sweet potatoes, Ichiko begins reaping rice and recalls her departure five years before.
In a small English coastal town, three teenage boys are drawn into a world of temptation and violence. Bored, troubled and excluded, the boys are unable to accept or even recognise moral boundaries. Their actions move inexorably towards a truly shocking act, that will horrify their sleepy community and expose its deepest, hidden fears.
The O'Neills lived happily in their house in the Australian countryside. That was until one day fate struck blindly, taking the life of Peter, the father, leaving his grief-stricken wife Dawn alone with their four children. Among them, eight-year-old Simone denies this reality. She is persuaded that her father still lives in the giant fig tree growing near their house and speaks to her through its leaves. But the tree becomes more and more invasive and threatens the house. It must be felled. Of course, Simone won't allow it.
Johan and Anna-Karin have been a couple for years but despite many attempts, Anna-Karin doesn't get pregnant. A visit to a fertility clinic shows why: Johan's sperm quality is too low. Johan is waiting to take over his father's farm, but what's the point if they can never have children? The news also puts a strain on their relationship since Anna-Karin desperately wants to be a mother.
The children of Iowa farmers find love, with mixed results, at the state fair.
The young high school graduate Göran and the 17-year-old Kerstin get to know each other on the estate of Göran's uncle Persson and fall in love. But their relationship is watched suspiciously by the jammed adult world. While Persson has an understanding of the youth, Kerstin's parents and the pastor of the village rant against the alleged immorality of the young people. Despite all the malice, Göran and Kerstin decide for their love. But this love should last only one summer.
A young boy lives with his mother on a farm surrounded by deep forest in the remote wilds of the Finnish countryside. From time to time, the boy visits his father - a man of great violence - in prison. Locked in the stable is an unruly horse, the boy´s only other companion. Their simple life is disrupted when a stranger appears, with a note from the father and a bullet in his side. Reluctantly, mother and son offer the stranger refuge.
Bepo
In the harsh post-war years' Catalan countryside, Andreu, a child that belongs to the losing side, finds the corpses of a man and his son in the forest. The authorities want his father to be made responsible of the deaths, but Andreu tries to help his father by finding out who truly killed them. In this search, Andreu develops a moral consciousness against a world of adults fed by lies. In order to survive, he betrays his own roots and ends up finding out the monster that lives within him.
Twenty years ago, three men set out on the longest walk of their lives. They vowed to repeat the walk, but this time they are joined by a forty year old wife and mother who is in the midst of a mid-life crisis.
Desirée, a modern librarian with urban friends and interests is visiting her late husband's grave when she meets Benny, a simple farmer. After his mother's death Benny lives alone on the run-down farm, desperately seeking a woman to take care of him. In spite of their differences the two have the dream of finding that special someone in common, and fall passionately in love. Benny wants Desirée to move in with him and start a family as soon as possible. But being a farmer's wife is not something she is very enthusiastic about. Just presenting Benny as her boyfriend proves to be an embarrassing experience. And when she gets a tempting job offer in Stockholm she has to consider her priorities carefully.
An inexperienced, sickly priest shows up in the rural French community of Ambricourt, where he joins the community's clergy. But the locals don't take kindly to the priest, and his ascetic ways and unsociable demeanor make him an outcast. During Bible studies at the nearby girls school, he is continually mocked by his students. Then his attempt to intervene in a family feud backfires into a scandal. His failures, compounded with his declining health, begin to erode his faith.
Irreverent city engineer Behzad comes to a rural Kurdish village in Iran to keep vigil for a dying relative. In the meanwhile the film follows his efforts to fit in with the local community and how he changes his own attitudes as a result.
Huw Morgan, the academically inclined youngest son in a proud family of Welsh coal miners, witnesses the tumultuous events of his young life during a period of rapid social change. At the dawn of the 20th-century, a miners' strike divides the Morgans: the sons demand improvements, and the father doesn't want to rock the boat.
The Mountain Bandit
In France, before WWI. As every Sunday, an old painter living in the country is visited by his son Gonzague, coming with his wife and his three children. Then his daugther Irene arrives. She is always in a hurry, she lives alone and does not come so often... An intimist chronicle in which what is not shown, what is guessed, is more important than how it looks, dealing with what each character expects of life.
Carmiña, the Flower of Galicia
An old leper who owned a remote sorghum winery dies. Jiu'er, the wife bought by the leper, and her lover, identified only as "my Grandpa" by the narrator, take over the winery and set up an idealized quasi-matriarchal community headed by Jiu'er. When the Japanese invaders subject the area to their rule and cut down the sorghum to make way for a road, the community rises up and resists as the sorghum grows anew.
Follows a big star who brings a film crew to her remote hometown for a shoot, and while the production is afflicted by disagreements between the crew, a bored local restaurant owner finds excitement to be the stand-in for the star.