Aquiles, an actor passionate about art, finds himself in conflict after receiving the tragic news that his theater company will close down. Accustomed to playing the masks of Commedia dell' Arte, the actor loses himself among them, alternating between reality and his former life on stage.
A marriage crisis between a writer and his wife leads her to flee to Germany and eventually return with another man, through whom the writer is going to overcome his writer's block.
1936. Giovanni Comini, the youngest Federal in Fascist Italy, is summoned to Rome for a delicate mission: to surveil aging national poet Gabriele D'Annunzio, whose increasingly restless behavior Mussolini fears could damage his alliance with Nazi Germany. However, after spending time with D'Annunzio, Comini finds himself torn between loyalty to the Party and his fascination with the poet, who will put his burgeoning career at risk.
Makhmalbaf puts an advertisement in the papers calling for an open casting for his next movie. However when hundreds of people show up, he decides to make a movie about the casting and the screen tests of the would-be actors.
Kaewta knows her final day is fast approaching. She decides to fly to New York City to forget her painful past and spend her last four months there. Fate plays games with her again when she has an accident upon her arrival, and she can't even remember who she is.
A spirited heiress wishing to break into theatre on her own merit arrives at a boardinghouse where aspiring young actresses and showgirls are brought together through their cynicism and disappointments.
Up against his money-grabbing relatives, his compromised superiors, and the state, a firm painter decides to protest by bricking up the windows of his house. Everyone wants to get their hands on his legacy. Will the protectors succeed?
Remarkable poet Elizabeth Barrett is slowly recovering from a crippling illness with the help of her siblings, especially her youngest sister, Henrietta, but feels stifled by the domestic tyranny of her wealthy widowed father. When she meets fellow poet Robert Browning in a romantic first encounter, her heart belongs to him. However, her controlling father has no intention of allowing her out of his sight.
A French playboy and an American former nightclub singer fall in love aboard a ship. They arrange to reunite six months later, if neither has changed their mind.
After an accident leaves her a paraplegic, a former soap opera star struggles to recover both emotionally and mentally, until she meets her newest nurse, who has struggles of her own.
A boozy Broadway actress comes out of a 12-week cure to face the problems of her best friends as well as her needy daughter. She tries to balance the terrors of returning to work with the demands of all around her with humor and insight, while staying off the booze.
For a poet with a gift for crafting words into barbs, Stevie Smith lives a relatively conventional life. Sheltered in a London suburb, she spends her days engaged in tedious housework, crafting verse and conversing with her aunt. But while her body may be committed to drudgery, Stevie's mind is constantly trying to break free, which causes her to rail against religion and middle-class values, and prevents her from finding happiness with a man interested in her.
In Alexandria, in 1938, Darley, a young British schoolmaster and poet, makes friends through Pursewarden, the British consular officer, with Justine, the beautiful and mysterious wife of a Coptic banker. He observes the affairs of her heart and incidentally discovers that she is involved in a plot against the British, meant to arm the Jewish underground in Palestine. The plot finally fails, Justine is sent to jail and Darley decides to return to England.
A ghostly meeting with Luís de Camões, the one-eyed adventurer, widely considered Portugal’s greatest poet. Luís de Camões is considered Portugal’s national poet, an equivalent to England’s Shakespeare or Spain’s Cervantes. João Lopes’s film takes us on an otherworldly journey to Camões’s five-hundred-year-old epic Os Lusíadas, which he composed in Macau whilst he was stationed in the colony.
When June Buckridge arrives at her London flat and announces 'They are going to murder me', her long-time lover and doll-cuddling flat mate Alice 'Childie' McNaught realizes that things are going to change. For June is referring to her character 'Sister George', a lovable nurse she portrays in a popular daytime serial. To make matters worse, the widowed executive at the BBC responsible for the decision to kill off Sister George - Mercy Croft is also a predatory lesbian who is after Childie and will stop at nothing to get what she wants.
Eugene Devlin, a once famous, now reclusive poet, searches through his past, looking for redemption and peace.
Actress Jessica Wells, sister of actor Damon Wells, is on top of her form except when her husband Vance is around. When Vance takes her to the apartment of a theatrical producer she comes home incoherent and Vance is found dead in the vanished producer's hotel suite.
Gordon Comstock is a copywriter at an ad agency, and his girlfriend Rosemary is a designer. Gordon believes he is a genius, a marvelous poet and quits the ad agency, trying to live on his poems, but poverty soon comes to him.
Con artist Nora must use her powers of persuasion and impersonation to get herself, her girlfriend, and ex-boyfriend free during a hostage situation at a bank.
A struggling artist is tortured by his day and finds his muse in the night.