Léon, the top hit man in New York, has earned a rep as an effective "cleaner". But when his next-door neighbors are wiped out by a loose-cannon DEA agent, he becomes the unwilling custodian of 12-year-old Mathilda. Before long, Mathilda's thoughts turn to revenge, and she considers following in Léon's footsteps.
Behrani, an Iranian immigrant buys a California bungalow, thinking he can fix it up, sell it again, and make enough money to send his son to college. However, the house is the legal property of former drug addict Kathy. After losing the house in an unfair legal dispute with the county, she is left with nowhere to go. Wanting her house back, she hires a lawyer and befriends a police officer. Neither Kathy nor Behrani have broken the law, so they find themselves involved in a difficult moral dilemma.
Roro, a foreign worker in Swedish parks, loves his girlfriend but is about to marry another girl to prevent her from being sent back to Lebanon. Meanwhile, Roro's best friend, Måns, has serious problems getting an erection.
Italian immigrant Francesca Cabrini arrives in 1889 New York City and is greeted by disease, crime, and impoverished children. Cabrini sets off on a daring mission to convince the hostile mayor to secure housing and healthcare for society's most vulnerable. With broken English and poor health, Cabrini uses her entrepreneurial mind to build an empire of hope unlike anything the world had ever seen.
Mexican immigrant and single mother Flor Moreno finds housekeeping work with Deborah and John Clasky, a well-off couple with two children of their own. When Flor admits she can't handle the schedule because of her daughter, Cristina, Deborah decides they should move into the Clasky home. Cultures clash and tensions run high as Flor and the Claskys struggle to share space while raising their children on their own, and very different, terms.
Expecting their first child, a married couple struggles to find romance and connection while building a new life together in America.
Nazi skinheads in Melbourne take out their anger on local Vietnamese, who are seen as threatening racial purity. Finally the Vietnamese have had enough and confront the skinheads in an all-out confrontation, sending the skinheads running. A woman who is prone to epileptic seizures joins the skins' merry band, and helps them on their run from justice, but is her affliction also a sign of impurity?
Teacher and novelist François Bégaudeau plays a version of himself as he negotiates a year with his racially mixed students from a tough Parisian neighborhood.
An Israeli film director interviews fellow veterans of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon to reconstruct his own memories of his term of service in that conflict.
Lorna is a young Albanian woman in a marriage of convenience with Claudy, a heroin addict. Just as Lorna is about to be granted Belgian citizenship, Claudy finds the strength to detox; this presents a problem not only for Lorna, but for the criminal who brokered the deal.
Somewhere in a remote part of South Africa a heinous crime is committed. Against the backdrop of xenophobic riots that have swept across the country, two Zimbabwean brothers along with a local girl are brutally attacked. The older brother is burnt alive whilst his younger sibling and the girl are sodomised, raped and left for dead. Three investigators from the elite crime fighting unit known as the Scorpions are deployed to a small town called Descent.
An immigrant Chinese wife joins her husband in 1950s America after he graduates from the university.
The path of Paraguayan immigrants who drive to Asuncion and then arrive in São Paulo. They are rural workers, musicians, vendors and underemployed people. Two parallel worlds: the Guarani culture and the Brazilian adventure in São Paulo juxtaposed with Paraguayan songs and the Guarani language, spoken by the main characters.
The story of Balbir Singh Gill aka Bobby, a Sikh grocery store owner who is kidnapped and tortured by four Americans who mistake him for a Muslim because he wears a turban.
Robert Denman, a manager at a construction company, loses everything he has to the throws of alcoholism.
Eight Pan-Asian female filmmakers’ powerful anthology film illuminates the immigrant experience in Aotearoa New Zealand through the lives of eight Asian women connected by the house they call home.
After Fred von Bergen, a German immigrant in America, is forced from his job by anti-German hysteria before the first world war, he and his friend Bob Wilson leave America and join the German air force. There, both men fall in love with ambulance driver Alida Hoffman. When America enters the war, Bob is caught between loyalty to his home country and the threat of execution for desertion and treason to Germany. It remains for his friend Fred to extricate him from the dilemma - but at what cost?
A young Caribbean immigrant mother struggling to make ends meet at her dye factory job finds a release through her abandoned dream of dance.
Released from prison and terminally ill, Parvis Karimpour is determined to be reunited with his daughter, Nasrin, who fled Iran for Europe many years before. Crossing the Mediterranean only to be unceremoniously dumped on the Spanish coast, Karimpour makes for Madrid in search of his erstwhile only child. Along the way he meets failed Italian pianist Fabrizio and spoilt German dreamer Almut – fellow migrants struggling to make their way in a Europe beset by economic turmoil. The search for Nasrin lends Karimpour’s new friends a sense of purpose, and the unlikely threesome take up her trail.
Matoom, a young Thai boy comes to the gradual understanding on the ephemerality of his family life through his re-collected memories - inspired by 'Bright', the first Thai novel by a female writer to have appeared in English.