A small traveling circus from Hanoi arrives at a village struck down by famine, trying to sell magic and dreams.
A woman is cursed with beauty in China and becomes prey for men. Raped by the prefect of her ballet school and sent to work camp, she escapes to decadent Hong Kong by marrying a wealthy banker. She finds herself drawn to sadomasochistic affairs and in flashbacks discovers she is the reincarnation of a famous courtesan of ancient China.
Five young men threw themselves with heart and soul into the work force. They have different approaches and different life styles.
Wu Viet is a Vietnamese refugee who wants to leave his country behind and start over in the United States. First, he must make his way to Hong Kong, but as he passes through Thailand, he meets a beautiful woman who travels with him. Wu and his new love end up in a refugee camp in Thailand, where they discover many of their countrymen are disappearing under mysterious circumstances. As Wu tries to learn the truth about what's happening, he discovers his life is in danger, and he must flee to the Philippines for safety.
Hong Kong student Ben Lee becomes friends with his mainland Chinese classmate Chang Chih while studying abroad in Japan. Ben is unmotivated to study and only cares about money and on the other hand, whenever Chih encounters a Chinese person, he would ask whereabouts of his childhood sweetheart. Ming is also from Hong Kong and in order to elevate his social status, he becomes involved with a bar hostess and owner Yuriko, hoping to become Yakuza leader Yamada Ishikawa's brother in-law.
A 12-year-old boy from America experiences the clash of cultures and the generation gap when he visits his grandfather in Shanghai.
Maria lives with her 18-year-old sister, Caterina in a small apartment, tutors her at home, lets her out only for dance classes. Yet Maria sees no reason to hide her work as a prostitute from her sister. Men come in and out of the apartment constantly, and Caterina turns up the volume on her music to drown out the sounds from the next room. The film soon reveals that the sisters are in love with each other, a situation that cannot stand, but exactly what prompts the characters' behavior is rarely clear. Soon after Caterina's belated discovery of her heterosexuality, she is invited into the bedroom with Maria and a client.
A mysterious criminal rolls into a small town planning to knock off the local bank, assuming it will go off without a hitch. But when he encounters a retired poetry professor, his plans take an unlikely turn. With no place to stay, the professor generously welcomes him into his home. As the two men talk, a bond forms between these two polar opposites, and surprising moments of humor and compassion emerge. As they begin to understand each other more, they each examine the choices they've made in their lives, secretly longing to live the type of lifestyle the other man has lived, based on the desire to escape their own.
I AM I is the story of a young woman, Rachael, who meets the father she never knew, Gene, at her mother's funeral. She discovers that her father is completely delusional and believes her to be her dead mother. After Rachael visits Gene in an assisted living home, she learns that he suffers from a disease called Korsakov's Syndrome, a form of retrograde amnesia and that her mother had placed him in this facility for treatment a year earlier. He does not remember anything past the age of thirty-three, and believes that he is still a young man. Unable to convince him of who she really is, Rachael decides to go along with her father's delusions by pretending to be her mother and discovers that under this guise, she and Gene can have "normal" conversations. Before long, Rachael is visiting Gene everyday, finding new ways to bring elements from his past into their present relationship.
On the eve of her 38th birthday, a woman desperately attempts to fix her broken biological clock.
A man struggling with a painful past tries to move forward, only to discover that the woman in his present life has an uncanny connection to his past.
A group of young people go to a remote marijuana farm where they hope to make quick cash. But, they discover the location's dark secrets and now must try to escape the mountain on which they are trapped.
A ten year old girl is received by her aunt because of her mother's confinement to a mental hospital. But the aunt lives with a man, Jean-Pierre, who seems to be a little too nice with the girl.
In São Paulo, Brazil, the lonely 40-something guitar teacher Baby lives a tedious life in a low middle-class apartment. She is addicted to her only companions: cigarettes. Baby has a constant conflict with her two sisters, over a couch she inherited from their deceased aunt. When Max, a restaurant musician, moves to the next door apartment, Baby has a crush on him and sees a chance to have a life again. Soon they start having a love affair, and Baby decides to quit smoking. However, her abstinence will be tough to deal with, when she notices Max still misses his ex-wife.
A drunken newspaperman, Jerry Corbett, is rescued from his alcoholic haze by an heiress, Joan Prentice, whose love sobers him up and encourages him to write a play, but he lapses back into dipsomania.
The story is set in 1939. A military officer is stripped of his rank for his apparent collaboration with a counter-espionage agent while on a mission in Paris. Then he is enlisted in his own country's counterespionage unit, due to his knowledge of languages. He is assigned to Gdansk where he is trying to uncover mysterious "Wotan" in the German Secret Service. He eventually tracks down and kills the agent, but by doing so wipes out the possibility to clearing himself of the charges. Just as the death sentence is to be carried out on him the war breaks out and he escapes out of the bombed prison to join partisans.
After a string of abusive relationships, Wanda abandons her family and seeks solace in the company of a petty criminal.
In 1998, an auction of the estate of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor causes great excitement. For one woman, Wally Winthrop, it has much more meaning. Wally becomes obsessed by their historic love story. As she learns more about the sacrifices involved, Wally gains her own courage to find happiness.
An American film-star and an unknown British actress meet on set in Rome. She is angry when he refuses to speak to her journalist father, but later they have a passionate relationship.
A story about a forming friendship between an elderly nun, Sister Anthony, and New York's Rockefeller Center's head landscape architect Richard Reilly, who wants to fell a tree she's been growing for decades and move it to New York for Christmas display.