The year is 2004. France has passed a law banning religious symbols in public schools. Mariam, born in France to Arab parents, recently began to wear the hijab after performing the hajj with her grandmother. At the start of the academic year, she pretends the new law does not exist, as she does not want to acknowledge it and so be forced to make a decision. To complicate matters, Karim, a popular young Arab boy in school, starts paying attention to her and she develops a powerful crush on him. While her fellow veiled classmates argue with teachers about their desire to keep wearing the hijab, and her parents argue about her wearing hers, Mariam dreams of Karim, despite her best friend Sophia’s warning that he is not serious. Things come to a head when the deadline for removing the hijab or facing expulsion falls the same week Mariam sees Karim with another girl.
Seo Chang-dae, an ambitious political campaign strategist who ends up having ideological differences with his present client, receives a lucrative offer that will put his loyalty under the microscope.
Anne Walberg is a celebrity in the world of perfume. She creates fragrances and sells her incredible talent to companies of all kinds. She lives as a diva, selfish, with a strong temper. Guillaume is her new driver and the only one who is not afraid to stand up to her. No doubt this is the reason why she does not fire him.
Life in a Tel Aviv apartment complex, an urban mosaic whose seedy characters, try as they might, can't get out of one another's faces. Gabi, a bobbed haired sexpot, and her lover Hezi—who's older, balding and married—rent a room to have an affair, while Ezra, a pot bellied divorcee, supervises an illegal construction site next door. All this racket drives Schwartz, a Holocaust survivor, to a mental breakdown. Other characters include illegal Chinese immigrants, a teenage boy who's afraid to serve in the army, and a corrupt police detective.
In 1940s Australia, a nameless nine-year-old Aboriginal orphan arrives in the dead of night at a remote monastery overseen by a renegade nun, where his presence disturbs its delicately balanced world.
The story of a mentally anguished high school history teacher going through a complete reassessment of his life. His method for reassessing his life is to narrate it to his class and interweave in it three generations of his family's history.
Stingo, a young writer, moves to Brooklyn in 1947 to begin work on his first novel. As he becomes friendly with Sophie and her lover Nathan, he learns that she is a Holocaust survivor. Flashbacks reveal her harrowing story, from pre-war prosperity to Auschwitz. In the present, Sophie and Nathan's relationship increasingly unravels as Stingo grows closer to Sophie and Nathan's fragile mental state becomes ever more apparent.
Toss lives on a sheep farm with her father in New Zealand. When Toss's father dies in an accident, Ethan, an itinerant hunter, wanders onto the family farm and is given a job by her grandfather. Toss's fairly innocent relationship with Ethan is severed when he forms a relationship with her mother.
Hunter, a newly pregnant housewife, finds herself increasingly compelled to consume dangerous objects. As her husband and his family tighten their control over her life, she must confront the dark secret behind her new obsession.
Based on the true childhood experiences of Noah Baumbach and his brother, The Squid and the Whale tells the touching story of two young boys dealing with their parents' divorce in Brooklyn in the 1980s.
Jackie is a CCTV operator. One day, a man shows his face on her monitor, a man she hoped never to see again. Now she has no choice and is compelled to confront him.
Enforcing the law within the notoriously rough Brownsville section of the city and especially within the Van Dyke housing projects is the NYPD's sixty-fifth precinct. Three police officers struggle with the sometimes fine line between right and wrong.
A condemned prisoner slowly falls in love with the married female artist who decorates his prison cell. Jin is a convicted killer awaiting execution on Death Row; Yeon is a lonely artist locked in a loveless marriage.
In Paris, a gold smuggler is at war with other local gangsters who want piece of the action. Then the mob shows up and makes things worse. And an undercover US Treasury Department agent is trying to infiltrate the smuggling business.
Jonas and Silvia are enjoying a wonderful sailing holiday in the Mediterranean sea. But while sailing through the night, far away from land, they discover an overloaded refugee boat, close to sinking. They are shocked, but too afraid to help. So they call the coast guards but lose the boat out of sight into the darkness of the night. In the early morning they find themselves drifting through an ocean of dead bodies. The refugee boat has sunk. Jonas and Silvia manage to pull a few survivors out of the cold water: Syrians. This rescue marks the beginning of a dramatic conflict between the hopes and dreams of the refugees, and the fears and ideals of the holiday sailors.
Twelve-year-old Noura dangles uncertainly in that difficult netherworld between childhood and adulthood. His growing libido has gotten him banned from the women's baths, where his mother took him when he was younger, but he's not yet old enough to participate in grown-up discussions with the men of his Tunisian village. Noura's only real friend is a troublemaker named Salih -- the village political outcast.