A young Pakistani Briton manages a rundown laundrette with his lover while dealing with tension in his family, the local Pakistani community, and a persistent mob of skinheads.
After a painful breakup, Ben develops insomnia. To kill time, he starts working the late night shift at the local supermarket, where his artistic imagination runs wild.
Penny works at a supermarket and Phil is a gentle taxi-driver. Penny’s love for Phil has run dry and they lead joyless lives with their two children, Rachel, a cleaner, and Rory, who is unemployed and aggressive.
A story of two people who fell in love and couldn't find their way in the big city: a man who came from the countryside to work in a steel factory and a woman who works in the factory restaurant.
In the late 19th century, two Swedish emigrants, Lasse Karlsson and his son Pelle, arrive on the Danish island of Bornholm hoping to find work on a farm and save enough money to travel to the United States of America.
A drama centered around a German construction manager who works with undocumented workers and an Albanian girl searching for her missing father.
No one expects much from Christy Brown, a boy with cerebral palsy born into a working-class Irish family. Though Christy is a spastic quadriplegic and essentially paralyzed, a miraculous event occurs when, at the age of 5, he demonstrates control of his left foot by using chalk to scrawl a word on the floor. With the help of his steely mother — and no shortage of grit and determination — Christy overcomes his infirmity to become a painter, poet and author.
Working-class British housewife Myra Savage reinvents herself as a medium, holding seances in the sitting room of her home with the hidden assistance of her under-employed, asthmatic husband, Billy. In an attempt to enhance her credibility as a psychic, Myra hatches an elaborate, ill-conceived plot to kidnap a wealthy couple's young daughter so that she can then help the police "find" the missing girl.
A Finnish man goes to the city to find a job after the mine where he worked is closed and his father commits suicide.
Selma, a Czech immigrant on the verge of blindness, struggles to make ends meet for herself and her son, who has inherited the same genetic disorder and will suffer the same fate without an expensive operation. When life gets too difficult, Selma learns to cope through her love of musicals, dreaming up little numbers to the rhythmic beats of her surroundings.
An idealistic high school graduate goes to work on a state farm on the Kyrgyz steppe, only to clash with its authoritarian leader.
A ticking-time-bomb insomniac and a slippery soap salesman channel primal male aggression into a shocking new form of therapy. Their concept catches on, with underground "fight clubs" forming in every town, until an eccentric gets in the way and ignites an out-of-control spiral toward oblivion.
Trevor, an insomniac lathe operator, experiences unusual occurrences at work and home. A strange man follows him everywhere, but no one else seems to notice him.
La Califfa's husband was killed during the strikes so she takes the side of the strikers. Her conflict with the plant owner Doverdo gradually turns into a love relationship.
After completing jail time for beating up a man who tried to seduce his mentally-handicapped teenage daughter, the Butcher wants to start life anew. He institutionalizes his daughter and moves to the Lille suburbs with his mistress, who promises him a new butcher shop. Learning that she lied, the Butcher returns to Paris to find his daughter.
A surreal event makes Bloke's head spin. A man's courage, masculinity and suffering come into question in this bizarre tale, one that can only be told with a side of mash and a cold beer.
When a impoverished widow’s family moves to the big city, two of her five sons become romantic rivals with deadly results.
Iris is a shy and dowdy young woman stuck in a dead-end job at a match factory, who dreams of finding love at the local dancehall. Finding herself pregnant after a one-night stand and abandoned by the father, Iris finally decides the time has come to get even and she begins to plot her revenge.
In nineteenth-century Łódź, Poland, three friends want to make a lot of money by building and investing in a textile factory. An exceptional portrait of rapid industrial expansion is shown through the eyes of one Polish town.
A solitary nurse bonds with a badly burned patient who survived an accident on an oil rig.