This Life 2: Those Left Behind

A nine-year-old boy’s preening obsession with straightening his hair elicits a tidal wave of homophobic panic in his hard-working mother, in this tender but clear-eyed coming-of-age tale.

The debut feature from Franco-Senegalese filmmaker Dyana Gaye charts the interconnected destinies of three far-flung sojourners across three continents. A quiet drama, about the anxieties of negotiating journeying to foreign countries and making a place for oneself in the world.

1979: Cousins Carole and Jérôme go on an organized trip to Odessa, behind the Iron Curtain. During the day, posing as tourists celebrating their engagement, they visit monuments and museums. In the evening they slip away from the group and meet “refuseniks”, Jews persecuted by the Soviet regime for wanting to leave the country. While Carole is motivated by political commitment and a taste for risk, Jérôme’s motivation is Carole.

Diane and Dora are two prostitutes who begin to rebel against their lot in life. Meanwhile, in another part of town, a murderer is at large.

Spanish photographer Francesc Boix, imprisoned in the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp, works in the SS Photographic Service. Between 1943 and 1945, he hides, with the help of other prisoners, thousands of negatives, with the purpose of showing the freed world the atrocities committed by the Nazis, exhaustively documented. He will be a key witness during the Nuremberg Trials.

More interested in partying and flirting with young musicians than work, veteran rock journalist Ellie Klug has one last chance to prove her value to her magazine’s editor: a no-stone-unturned search to discover what really happened to long lost rock god, Matt Smith, who also happens to be her ex-boyfriend. Teaming up with an eccentric amateur documentary filmmaker, Ellie hits the road in search of answers.

The whole family is reunited when Sofia comes back for his father's funeral. Quickly, inner problems are revealed.

A re-telling of the pre-telling of a story of the end.

A trio of singers entertaining hospitalized soldiers during WWII encourage a wounded soldier in his love for a nurse.

Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay's famous tale of 3 generations of women & their changing position in society,seen in relation to a box of jewels, handed down from one generation to the next. A film by Aparna Sen.

Lacey is a girl of about ten. On a lazy day, she watches some TV, rides her bike in front of her house, then explores a field across from her front door. A shirtless man pets her dog. She goes up to him and he bends close to take a bug off her shoulder and hand it to her. Is this an innocent or a dangerous world? Is Lacey in trouble?

Columbus' 4th voyage has been a total failure: he has not found the westward passage, he has no gold to show, he has lost men and ships and his efforts to build a colony have fallen through. The monarchs of Spain are not going to restore the rights and privileges which were taken away from Columbus after the first voyage. And Columbus will be shamed. Many of his sailors who have survived, can't face the journey home. They will choose to remain on Hispaniola or neighbouring Puerto Rico.

Camille, a mercurial César-winning actress, has seen better times. Estranged from her husband, she's with her children only every other weekend. It's her weekend, but her agent has booked her to MC a Rotary club dinner in Vichy. She takes them with her, and when her husband learns this, he demands to pick them up at once. She bolts in a rented car to the seaside, trying to improve her relations with the children, especially the precocious and distant Vincent. He loves astronomy. A rare meteor shower is due in a few days, so she suggests they go to a plateau in Spain hoping to see it. He agrees, but the relationship remains difficult, and her husband is on their trail.

At the end of World War II, Giovanna, a war bride living near Milan refuses to accept that her husband, Antonio, missing on the Russian front, is dead. There's a flashback to their brief courtship near her hometown of Naples, his 12-day leave to marry her, ruses to keep from deployment, and the ultimate farewell. Some years after the war, still with no word from Antonio, Giovanna goes to Russia to find him, starting in the town near the winter battle when he disappeared. Armed with his photograph, what will she find?

An Austrian teenager marries the Dauphin of France and becomes that country's queen following the death of King Louis XV in 1774. Years later, after a life of luxury and privilege, Marie Antoinette loses her head during the French Revolution.

Starting his new job as an instructor at a New England school for the deaf, James Leeds meets Sarah Norman, a young deaf woman who works at the school as a member of the custodial staff. In spite of Sarah's withdrawn emotional state, a romance slowly develops between the pair.

In the years before World War II, a penniless Japanese child is torn from her family to work as a maid in a geisha house.

Or shoulders a lot: she's 17 or 18, a student, works evenings at a restaurant, recycles cans and bottles for cash, and tries to keep her mother Ruthie from returning to streetwalking in Tel Aviv. Ruthie calls Or "my treasure," but Ruthie is a burden. She's just out of hospital, weak, and Or has found her a job as a house cleaner. The call of the quick money on the street is tough for Ruthie to ignore. Or's emotions roil further when the mother of the youth she's in love with comes to the flat to warn her off. With love fading and Ruthie perhaps beyond help, Or's choices narrow.

Fiona and Grant have been married for nearly 50 years. They have to face the fact that Fiona’s absent-mindedness is a symptom of Alzheimer’s disease. She must go to a specialized nursing home, where she slowly forgets Grant and turns her affection to Aubrey, another patient in the home.

Filmmakers from all over the world provide short films – each of which is eleven minutes, nine seconds, and one frame of film in length – that offer differing perspectives on the 9/11 terrorist attacks.