Seven short films - each one focused on the plight of a different child protagonist.
A former world-famous conductor of the Bolshoï orchestra, known as "The Maëstro", Andreï Filipov had seen his career publicly broken by Leonid Brezhnev for hiring Jewish musicians and now works cleaning the concert hall where he once directed. One day, he intercepts an official invitation from the prestigious Théâtre du Châtelet. Through a series of mad antics, he reunites his old orchestra, now composed of old alcoholic musicians, and flies to perform in Paris and complete the Tchaikovsky concerto interrupted 30 years earlier. For the concerto, he engages a young violin soloist with whom he has an unexpected connection.
Just after World War I, Major Foster is incorporating new recruits into his French Foreign Legion platoon when he is sent to his former remote outpost located in the French Morocco to protect an archaeological excavation from El Krim, a Rifian leader who intends to unite all local tribes to fight the colonial government…
Lubo Moser is a jenisch, a gypsy. Mirana, who tried to oppose him, was killed. But how could this have happened? Why? Because Switzerland considers nomadism a social scourge, and, to eradicate it, it takes the children of the jenisch. Thus, without children, the Jenisch will be without a future. The mastermind is a state-run humanitarian institution, Pro Juventute, the arm the Street Children's Work: everything is perfectly legal and there is no opposition to the law. Lubo feels himself dying. And something about him really does die, on that night of wind and snow: it will be a new Lubo, tough and impenetrable, who will set up a project with unexpected implications to avenge his family and his people... and it will lead us to rethink the sense of justice, in the blurred boundaries between good and evil.
Suzanne, Renee, Nina and Marta all hate being in prison, being slapped and treated badly, and so all the girls are trying to escape. Madame Appel just causes chaos all the time, with her harsh manners. When Yvonne with her free-thinking ways is put in charge of the school for misbehaving girls, and asks them to tell her their complaints, they don't believe her at first. Yvonne is in love and about to marry the establishment's doctor, and it does not help that one teenage girl falls for him - and is corresponded. It's a hard life for the girls, and for the new female warden.
Perhan is a gypsy teenager with telekinetic powers. A wealthy gypsy, Ahmed, visits the village and promises to get Perhan's sister the medical treatment she needs if they join him to Italy. Perhan soon discovers that Ahmed's business activities are in fact quite shady and he is soon lured into the elder's corrupt surroundings.
Zharko, leader of the Romanis in NYC, passes his position of leadership on to his unwilling grandson, Dave, leading to infighting between Dave and his father.
Locked in her cell, a murderer reflects on the events that have led her to death row.
An actress gets involved with a criminal gang and winds up taking the rap for a $40,000 bank robbery. Before being sent to prison, she steals the money from her partners and hides it, thinking to use it as a bargaining chip to be released from prison. However, her former partners have different ideas.
Pio Amato, a 14 year-old member of a small Romani community in southern Italian town of Gioia Tauro in Calabria, is in a hurry to grow up. Pio follows his older brother Cosimo everywhere and from him he learns how to hustle and how to navigate the streets of his hometown. One night Pio sets out to prove to his brother that he is as good or better than him but, when things go wrong, a series of events will forever change the way he sees the world.
After a high-speed car chase, Madea winds up behind bars because her quick temper gets the best of her. Meanwhile, Assistant District Attorney Josh Hardaway lands a case that's too personal to handle: that of a young prostitute and former drug addict named Candace, also a childhood friend. When Candace winds up in jail, Madea takes the young woman under her protective wing.
The story deals with the gaieties and frolics of Gypsies led by Ricardo, shown here dancing with Ramona.
A crusading psychiatrist battles a sadistic female warden to improve conditions at a women's prison.
A young refugee travels from Russia to America in search of her lost father and falls in love with a gypsy horseman.
The story of Michael Berg, a German lawyer who, as a teenager in the late 1950s, had an affair with an older woman, Hanna, who then disappeared only to resurface years later as one of the defendants in a war crimes trial stemming from her actions as a concentration camp guard late in the war. He alone realizes that Hanna is illiterate and may be concealing that fact at the expense of her freedom.
Jenny is young. Her life is over. She killed someone. And she would do it again. When an 80-year-old piano teacher discovers the girl’s secret, her brutality and her dreams, she decides to transform her pupil into the musical wunderkind she once was.
Released after being wrongfully convicted and imprisoned for 13 years, a woman begins executing her elaborate plan of retribution.
After fleeing from his foster family, 11-years-old Khamsa returns to the gypsy camp where he was born. With his cousin, Tony "The Midget", Khamsa dreams of getting rich with cock fights. Nothing seems to have changed since he left, the card games, the Mediterranean Sea... Until his best friend, Coyote, meets Rachitique, a small-time crook. Very soon they pass from stealing scooters to armed robbery, and Khamsa quickly spirals down into delinquency.
On Saturday, 5 April 1941, one day before the Invasion of Yugoslavia of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, a colourful group of random passengers on a country road deep in the heart of Serbia board a dilapidated bus, headed for the capital Belgrade. The group includes two gypsy musicians, a World War I veteran, a Germanophile, a budding singer, a sickly looking man, and a hunter with a shotgun. The bus is owned by Krstic senior, and driven by his impressionable and dim-witted son Misko.
After killing a man in a drunk driving accident, a young woman is sent to a prison where both the inmates and the corrupt leadership are violent and abusive.