Looking for Joy

In the Swedish city of Lethe, people from different walks of life take part in a series of short, deadpan vignettes that rush past. Some are just seconds long, none longer than a couple of minutes. A young woman remembers a fantasy honeymoon with a rock guitarist. A man awakes from a dream about bomber planes. A businessman boasts about success while being robbed by a pickpocket, and so on. The absurdist collection is accompanied by Dixieland jazz and similar music.

As children in the loving Ekdahl family, Fanny and Alexander enjoy a happy life with their parents, who run a theater company. After their father dies unexpectedly, however, the siblings end up in a joyless home when their mother, Emilie, marries a stern bishop. The bleak situation gradually grows worse as the bishop becomes more controlling, but dedicated relatives make a valiant attempt to aid Emilie, Fanny and Alexander.

Tobias is the new, idealistic priest in a suburb but he soon learns that his flock is quite uninterested in Christianity. However, he befriends Carolina, a chain smoking woman his age, wheelchair-bound since birth. It is opposites attract although their backgrounds are different.

When an arranged marriage brings Ada and her spirited pre-teen daughter Flora to the wilderness of 19th-century New Zealand, she finds herself locked in a battle of wills with both her controlling husband and a rugged frontiersman to whom she develops a forbidden attraction.

Elisabeth leaves her abusive and drunken husband Rolf, and goes to live with her brother, Göran. The year is 1975 and Göran lives in a commune called Together. Living in this leftist commune Elisabeth learns that the world can be viewed from different perspectives.

A young Greek woman falls in love with a non-Greek and struggles to get her family to accept him while she comes to terms with her heritage and cultural identity.

A boy, obsessed with comparing himself with those less fortunate, experiences a different life at the home of his aunt and uncle in 1959 Sweden.

Jag är ingen ö

After a one night stand with Alex, Isabel realizes that she is pregnant and they decide to get married. However, along with the marriage comes compromise of one's own cultural traditions.

Gaby Diaz, an app developer from Austin, Texas, and the last unmarried sibling in her family, heads to her abuela’s house in Oaxaca, Mexico, for the holidays. When she accidentally adds Alex Alvarada, a graphic designer who’s lost touch with his own Mexican roots, to the family group chat, her family invites him to come along for the holidays.

In several unrelated stories, the consequences of putting one's foot down – or failing to do so – are explored.

In 1972, disenchanted about the dreary conventions of English life, 25-year-old Julia heads for Morocco with her daughters, six-year-old Lucy and precocious eight-year-old Bea.

As Agnes slowly dies of cancer, her sisters are so immersed in their own psychic pains that they are unable to offer her the support she needs.

Queen Christina of Sweden abdicates and travels to Rome to embrace the Catholic church.

Sabina has travelled from Romania to Holmsund in northern Sweden to find a job with her brothers. Elin has just finished school and is enjoying the first day of the summer holidays. That evening they meet, and it's a meeting that lasts forever.

When a western Pennsylvania auto plant is acquired by a Japanese company, brokering auto worker Hunt Stevenson faces the tricky challenge of mediating the assimilation of two clashing corporate cultures. At one end is the Japanese plant manager and the sycophant who is angling for his position. At the other, a number of disgruntled long-time union members struggle with the new exigencies of Japanese quality control.

A Woman is a Flower is about the bond between two sisters who are dealing with two very different and heavy struggles.

Nombeko Mayeki is a young woman from Soweto who finds herself caught in an international whirlwind from South Africa to Sweden. A heroine born in the slums of South Africa, she rises from obscurity to become the key player in an international nuclear conspiracy, accidentally saving the Swedish monarchy and averting global catastrophe with her quick-witted resourcefulness.

When Oskar, a sensitive, bullied 12-year-old boy, meets his new neighbor, the mysterious and moody Eli, they strike up a friendship. Initially reserved with each other, Oskar and Eli slowly form a close bond, but it soon becomes apparent that she is no ordinary young girl.

Arn has served his term in the Holy land and returns home to be reunited with his beloved Cecilia. When he returns home, he discovers that political forces tries to separate him and Cecilia - but thanks to queen Blanka they can finally get married. Arn knows that war is looming and with his martial knowledge he starts to build an army at his new home at Forsvik.