An Eastern European tourist unexpectedly finds himself stranded in JFK airport, and must take up temporary residence there.
In Babel, a tragic incident involving an American couple in Morocco sparks a chain of events for four families in different countries throughout the world.
A pregnant Colombian teenager becomes a drug mule to make some desperately needed money for her family.
Detective John Shaft travels incognito to Ethiopia, then France, to bust a human trafficking ring.
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.
Angie is a working class woman. After being fired, she decides to set up a recruitment agency of her own, running it from her kitchen with her friend, Rose. Taking advantage of the desperation of immigrants, Angie builds a successful business extremely quickly.
When brash Texas border officer Mike Norton wrongfully kills and buries the friend and ranch hand of Pete Perkins, the latter is reminded of a promise he made to bury his friend, Melquiades Estrada, in his Mexican home town. He kidnaps Norton and exhumes Estrada's corpse, and the odd caravan sets out on horseback for Mexico.
Instead of enjoying her vacations in a peaceful peninsula of Turkey, Anna feels stuck in a strange torpor, while her boyfriend, Thomas, doesn't seem to notice it at all. Later in the afternoon, when a little girl suddenly disappears on the beach, Anna awakens and decides to go and find her, despite the unknown and the nightfall.
A college professor travels to New York City to attend a conference and finds a young couple living in his apartment.
After her husband deserts her, working-class mother Ray Eddy is in great need of money to find a home. Lured by the possibility of easy cash, she joins Lila, a widowed Mohawk who earns a living by smuggling immigrants from Canada to the U.S. across the St. Lawrence.
A French woman falls in love with a Yugoslavian man, not realizing that he is an illegal immigrant.
In the south of France, in a vast plain region called the Camargue, lives White Mane, a magnificent stallion and the leader of a herd of wild horses too proud to let themselves be broken by humans. Only Folco, a young fisherman, manages to tame him. A strong friendship grows between the boy and the horse, as the two go looking for the freedom that the world of men won’t allow them.
The only survivor of an illegal boat trip bound for Puerto Rico struggles to survive in a deserted isle. As time passes, the castaway comes to believe the island is testing him by granting him what he needs if he chooses to stay.
Bilal is 17 years old, a Kurdish boy from Iraq. He sets off on an adventure-filled journey across Europe. He wants to get to England to see his love who lives there. Bilal finally reaches Calais, but how do you cover 32 kilometers of the English Channel when you can't swim? The boy soon discovers that his trip won't be as easy as he imagined... The community of struggling illegal aliens in Calais
A Mexican farmhand migrates to America to better support his family, but his dream crashes to the ground when his wife and daughter can't meet him across the border.
Jeb Maynard is a patrolman guarding the U.S.-Mexican border, whose partner and buddy Scooter has just been murdered. Maynard knows that a smuggler of illegal aliens is responsible for Scooter's death, but the feds insist that drug dealers committed the crime.
The crew of a bankrupt Scottish trawler turn to smuggling illegal immigrants over the stormy waters of the North Sea.
A restaurateur befriends a Syrian refugee who has recently arrived in Finland.
Brother and sister Enrique and Rosa flee persecution at home in Guatemala and journey north, through Mexico and on to the United States, with the dream of starting a new life.
Sayra, a Honduran teen, hungers for a better life. Her chance for one comes when she is reunited with her long-estranged father, who intends to emigrate to Mexico and then enter the United States. Sayra's life collides with a pair of Mexican gangmembers who have boarded the same American-bound train.