Ivanhoe Martin arrives in Kingston, Jamaica, looking for work and, after some initial struggles, lands a recording contract as a reggae singer. He records his first song, "The Harder They Come," but after a bitter dispute with a manipulative producer named Hilton, soon finds himself resorting to petty crime in order to pay the bills. He deals marijuana, kills some abusive cops and earns local folk hero status. Meanwhile, his record is topping the charts.
Hollywood, 1930s. Tod Hackett, a young painter who tries to make his way as an art director in the lurid world of film industry, gets infatuated with his neighbor Faye Greener, an aspiring actress who prefers the life that Homer Simpson, a lone accountant, can offer her.
In a rundown area of Buenos Aires, at the dawn of the 1980s, Adrian LeDuc owns both a struggling movie theater and a shabby apartment building filled with eccentric, squabbling tenants. To make ends meet, Adrian takes in a roommate, Jack Carney, but soon begins to suspect that the quiet American is responsible for a series of political assassinations that are rocking the city.
José Sirgado is a low-budget filmmaker whose heroin addiction distorts his perspective of the real world. Although he is a depressed and unstable individual, his mood improves when he receives the mysterious films of Pedro, with whom he shares his passion for cinema.
During the last years of Franco's dictatorship, Fernando, an old republican exile, returns to his home in a small Castilian village and befriends Aurora, a young and attractive teacher.
A group of college students, led by Claudia, decide to investigate a local tower that has figured prominently in disturbing reoccurring dreams Claudia has been having. They are suspended from school for their antics, but Claudia learns from one of the female staff members that the person in the dream is a student who killed herself years before and that the headmistress has seen her ghost.
On a dark and rainy night, a historic and regal Taipei cinema sees its final film: 1967 martial arts feature "Dragon Inn".
In 1939, boy-wonder Orson Welles leaves New York, where he has succeeded in radio and theater, and, hired by RKO Pictures, moves to Hollywood with the purpose of making his first film.
A movie-theater employee adjusts to a new life as the cinema he's worked at for over 25 years faces closure.
César Neira, an almost forgotten Spanish actor, gets involved by chance with Teresa, a teacher from a small village in the province of Cáceres, who has won a radio contest. The prize is a trip to Madrid to experience just for a fortnight the life of the famous and wealthy people.
Salvador Mallo, a filmmaker in the twilight of his career, remembers his life: his mother, his lovers, the actors he worked with. The sixties in a small village in Valencia, the eighties in Madrid, the present, when he feels an immeasurable emptiness, facing his mortality, the incapability of continuing filming, the impossibility of separating creation from his own life. The need of narrating his past can be his salvation.
London, 1956. Genius actor and film director Laurence Olivier is about to begin the shooting of his upcoming movie, premiered in 1957 as The Prince and the Showgirl, starring Marilyn Monroe. Young Colin Clark, who dreams on having a career in movie business, manages to get a job on the set as third assistant director.
Based on the life of a classic french cineast Jean Vigo, the story follows his daily struggle with sanity, normal life and uncompromising filmmaking. Story also focuses on his relationship with his supporting wife whom he met in sanatorium.
Madrid, Spain, 1975. Sandra, Lina and Eva are three beautiful women who work as actresses in erotic movies. After meeting during a shoot, they become friends and begin to share experiences, concerns and successes in an era of increasing openness, although true freedom is still far away and demands a price hard to pay.
Lamento
Madrid, Spain, 1982. TV director Chicho Ibáñez Serrador asks André, a lousy actor playing a ventriloquist, to work with Charlie, a disturbing dummy.
Carlos and his girlfriend Carmen are a happy and fun couple; however, his friend León and his girlfriend Luisa are quite the opposite; so Carlos recommends León to visit the mysterious Kamus —an artist, a drunkard, a philosopher—, in the hope that he can free him from his depressing and contagious existential pessimism…
Hollywood, 1942. The US government pressures Hungarian-born film director Michael Curtiz, who is about to finish shooting Casablanca, to accentuate the film's propaganda message in order to sway public opinion in favor of the country's intervention in the European war.
The creative and ambitious Carlos, a young Spanish film buff, manages to become a professional camera operator with time and effort, and is also blessed with the love of Anna, which he has longed for; but the outbreak of the Civil War in 1936 changes everything for both of them.
Sussex, England, 1938. Shortly before the outbreak of World War II, Thomasina and Martha Hanbury, two ingenious sisters, create LOLA, a miraculous machine.