A young girl's faith is tested, when her parents are suddenly killed in a car accident and she's forced to move in with relatives who don't share her belief in God. A talented singer, who desires to worship God with her songs, she finds herself in a new city, a new school and no friends. With her uncle and others at school challenging her faith, one boy emerges, who seems to see the greatness in her. Now she must come to grips with either fitting in or following God - which could cost her more than just her faith.
After years of hospitalization for alcoholism, a techno musician makes her son swear to never let her spend the rest of her life in an institution. When her doctors diagnose her with permanent brain damage, 20-year-old Adam, who is deaf and completely on his own, must decide whether to break his promise or help her die...
Ex-swimming champion Mary now works as a mermaid at the New York Aquarium, struggling to raise her 7-year-old son, Lulu, on her own. When they get evicted, to protect him, she pretends they are about to embark on a beautiful journey. But in doing so, she’s beginning to lose — and eventually find — herself.
Nicole and her son Serge live in a low-income housing estate in the Paris suburbs, where their love for each other thrives against all odds. But as Christmas approaches, Nicole has her checkbook and credit card confiscated, turning their relationship and their lives upside down.
The lives of three women have a commonality: adoption. Karen is a physical therapist who regrets that, as a teenager, she gave up her daughter for adoption. Elizabeth was an adopted child and is now a successful lawyer, but her personal life lacks warmth. Lucy and her husband have failed to conceive and now hope to adopt a baby to make their family complete.
Tarzan was a small orphan who was raised by an ape named Kala since he was a child. He believed that this was his family, but on an expedition Jane Porter is rescued by Tarzan. He then finds out that he's human. Now Tarzan must make the decision as to which family he should belong to...
Ten-year-old Nico receives a threatening letter and now his life is in danger. No one seems to believe him except one person that he doesn't know.
A wealthy professional gay couple, who wish to adopt children, see their lives turned topsy turvy when they take in two misbehaving brothers.
In the early days of Nazi Germany, a powerful noble family must adjust to life under the new dictatorship regime.
Charles is a bored civil servant struggling through a harsh Utah winter. He spends most of his time reflecting on his romance with Laura, a coworker who left him to return to her husband, an A-Frame salesman.
This loosely plotted coming-of-age tale follows the life of 15-year-old Laurent Chevalier as he stumbles his way over the burgeoning swell of adolescence in 1950s France. After having his first sexual experience with a prostitute and dodging the lips of a priest, Chevalier contracts a case of scarlet fever. When the fever leaves him with a heart murmur, Chevalier is placed in a sanatorium, along with his over-attentive and adulterous mother.
At the end of the Spanish civil war, Fando, a boy of about ten, tries to make sense of war and his father's arrest. His mother is religious, sympathetic to the Fascists; his father is accused of being a Red. Fando discovers that his mother may have aided in his father's arrest. Sometimes we witness Fando imagining explanations for what's going on; sometimes we see him at play, alone or with his friend Thérèse. Oedipal fantasies and a lad's natural curiosity about sex and death mix with his search for his mother's nature and his father's fate. Will Fando survive the search?
Adopted from South Korea, raised on different continents & connected through social media, Samantha & Anaïs believe that they are twin sisters separated at birth.
Episodic study of feelings where six stories intertwine over one Saturday in a small town. Two boys save a young woman, Anni, and her baby from suicide by drowning. Esa, a down-on-his-luck musician in need of a loan, arrives to his father's 60th birthday party. Waitress Leena tries to stir up a romance between her co-workers at a pizza parlor. Middle-aged Ilpo comes home early from the paper mill and finds a strange man in their bedroom. Old Milja waits for her daughter Merja at the hospital where she is visiting her terminally ill husband Henri. Teenage Santeri tries to cope with his homosexuality.
Michele is a Communist MP who loses his memory in a car crash—although nobody seems to notice. Over the course of a water polo match ahead of election day, he begins to remember his past life, revealing the picture of a man whose personal and political identity crisis mirrors the one of Italian communism.
Amanda Wingfield dominates her children with her faded gentility and exaggerated tales of her Southern belle past. Her son plans escape; her daughter withdraws into a dream world. When a gentleman caller appears, things move to crisis point.
A mother lives quietly with her son. One day, a girl is brutally killed, and the boy is charged with the murder. Now, it's his mother's mission to prove him innocent.
A petty thief is put on trial for the attempted murder of a lawyer. Through a series of flashbacks, the intertwining lives of the thief, the lawyer, and the thief's defense lawyer are illustrated.
Evelyn and her oblivious son Ziggy seek out replacements for each other. As Evelyn tries to parent an unassuming teenager at her shelter, Ziggy fumbles through his pursuit of a brilliant young woman at school.
A young single father trying to find the strength to love. A feminist librarian, single by conviction, who’s decided that she won’t be a mother. A six-year-old child trying to find a place in a new family structure. By revealing their aspirations, their fears, their choices, Carine Tardieu depicts different ways in which humans create families.