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- Bintou is beaten by her husband Abel, for using housekeeping money to pay for her daughter to go to school. He believes that only his sons should be educated. Bintou is determined to earn the money herself, but the only skill she knows is growing millet sprouts. She has to find the pots, and obtain sacks of millet from the storekeeper, while her husband continually sabotages her efforts.
- Samson Shillitoe, mad genius of a poet irresistible to women, but plagued by writer's block, agrees to see a psychiatrist, and his beautiful wife.
- A seasoned geisha and her apprentice maiko are forced to give in to their clients' sexual advances to survive.
- Sabine vows to give up married lovers, and is determined to find a good husband. Her best friend Clarisse introduces her to her cousin Edmond, a busy lawyer from Paris. Sabine pursues Edmond, with the encouragement of Clarisse, but Edmond does not seem very interested.
- Brian Jessel, a civil servant in the Cabinet Office, is asked to investigate the mysterious death of the civil servant Stephen Summerchild twenty years earlier. Summerchild was working on a Cabinet project, under the Oxford philosophy don Elizabeth Serafin, to find the "quality of life" in Britain. Jessel finds a box of audio tapes from the project containing all the discussions up to the time Summerchild fell off the Admiralty Building.
- Bayinbulag and Somiya are brought up, from a young age, as brother and sister by their adoptive grandmother. The three live happily in a yurt on the Mongolian steppes. Just before Bayinbulag is to leave for the city, to be trained as a vet, the grandmother suggests that Bayinbulag and Somiya should eventually marry. Bayinbulag, now training to be a musician, stays away for long periods of time without communicating with Somiya. He finally comes back expecting to marry her.
- A government minister from Hanoi has a car accident on the way to a wedding in a remote village. The county hospital does not have the authority to operate on a minister. The county commissioner would like the operation done in the county for the prestige it would bring, but will not authorize it without the approval of the whole county committee. The hospital director has filled his quota, so does not want to take the risk of an operation. Since a telephone call to Hanoi has to be booked two days in advance, the minister's wife cannot be contacted, nor can a helicopter be arranged to move the minister to Hanoi.
- The wine taster and merchant Martin Lynch-Gibbon is married to the shallow and spoiled Antonia Lynch-Gibbon, and loves his mistress Georgie Hands. Antonia is under therapy with Martin's best friend, the psychiatrist Palmer Anderson. One day, Antonia decides to ask for a divorce from Martin, to live with Palmer, but they want to keep Martin as their friend. When Palmer's sister Dr. Honor Klein comes from Oxford to stay with her brother, she discloses the affair of Georgie, who was her student, and Martin to Palmer and Antonia. Meanwhile, Martin's brother Alexander Lynch-Gibbon has a love affair with Georgie, and Martin falls in unrequited love with Honor, but he discovers a secret about Palmer. Who will stay with whom in the end?
- A sailor returns to his hometown after 7 years and remembers the dark and the light moments of his past.
- A Chinese prostitute weds, studies painting, and becomes a renowned artist and professor in Paris.
- Ishun is a wealthy but unsympathetic master printer who has wrongly accused his wife and best employee of being lovers. To escape punishment, the accused run away together, but Ishun is certain to be ruined if word gets out.
- Arguably the most famous edition of Play For Today, and one of the most beloved, as Mike Leigh directs a comedy of manners. Middle-class suburbia gets to reveal its darker side over the course of an increasingly uncomfortable drinks party.
- Paris, summer 1960. Michel is about to leave for Algeria for military service. He meets Liliane and Juliette, two inseparable friends. Michel goes on vacation to Corsica, where the two girls decide to join him
- A middle-aged executive's lifestyle and values are turned upside down after he is demoted to chain-store night manager.
- An upper-class widow falls in love with a much younger, down-to-earth nurseryman, much to the disapproval of her children and criticism of her country club peers.
- An aging widower arranges a marriage for his only daughter.
- Two blind masseurs travel to a mountain retreat. One of them falls for a visiting lady from Tokyo and investigates a series of thefts.
- Anna, an aging Czech movie star, comes to NYC struggling to establish her career. When she meets a beautiful, young peasant girl, she teaches her the ins and outs of acting, only to have the young girl become a screen star instead.
- A pretty pickpocket is travelling on an express train from Osaka to her home village. She is an orphan, but wants to show off her wealth to the villagers who accused her father of being a spy. Detective Kita, who is on holiday, recognizes her and suggests to a pulp writer that he use her as a model for a story. While in a tunnel, she picks the wrong wallet from the man beside her, and subsequently loses her savings to an older woman pickpocket. At an inn, the writer replaces her money. The writer knows that the detective is falling in love with her, and the two follow her to her village. They find that the village is now part of a US air base and bombing range.
- In Paris, unhappy movie actress Catherine Crachat becomes infatuated with the mathematician Pierre Indemini, but then breaks up with him. After a film shoot in Vienna, Catherine stays with a rich admirer, Fanny Hohenstein. Fanny has a history of many lovers of both sexes, two of whom killed themselves over her.
- 12-year-old Lily lives with her father, who has been suspended from the police force, and her stepmother. Her parents sell Lily's aging dog to Mr. Teban for dog meat. Lily convinces Mr. Teban to return her dog, then begins a friendship with the dog-meat seller, much to the disgust of her family and friends. Mr. Teban becomes her surrogate father, and supports Lily against her abusive father and ineffectual stepmother.
- In Texas, a woman and her young daughter head down to another town where the girl's irresponsible, hotheaded and immature father has just been released from prison on parole.
- Wang Shuangli is Deputy Director of the local Cultural Centre, and hopes to be appointed Director. However Old Ma is brought in from the country and installed as Director. This starts a long train of events with Wang's cronies using the bureaucracy to try to oust the new director. At home, Wang has problems because his father wants Wang to have a son to carry on the family name. However, because of the one-child policy, Wang cannot have any more children unless his young daughter is certified infirm.
- After five years of travelling abroad, Alex arrives back in Montreal. All he has with him are a back-pack and a slip of paper with an ex-girlfriend's address scrawled on it. When this address turns out to be a demolished building, Alex feels like - lost. His long journey has ended with a pile of rubble. For a while, he allows himself to drift through whatever situation life throws his way. But when he moves into an apartment building with an odd, lively array of characters, Alex desperately tries to ground himself. He longs to become part of a family - any family - whether its a prefab family (with Anne, a single mother of two), a family "by default" (his neighbours), or a family "in waiting" (with Ayla, the single ex-girlfriend of his best friend). But Alex has to decide whether he wants to stay put or keep moving. He wants to keep all of his options open - before they disappear.
- The story of a girl who become the toast of Paris high-society. Through her marriage to one of France's most notorious degenerates, Colette's eyes are opened to every form of sexual depravity - shameless adventures that stir her.
- Husband and wife Gorô and Chiyo, and their only offspring, an infant son named Tarô, go through the ups and downs of family life living in a cramped modern apartment building in suburban Tokyo. Their story is told in Tarô's second year of life. Many of their issues stem from both Gorô and Chiyo being unsure of themselves as parents, and being different in their perspectives of parenting, Gorô who believes in the traditional roles in which Chiyo is tasked with most of the child rearing responsibilities especially around the home. They also differ in the number of children they want, Gorô who believes Tarô is enough of a handful, while Chiyo really wants at least one more child in the general joy she feels in being a mother despite the problems. The unsurety that Gorô and Chiyo feel about their parenting is confirmed by Tarô, openly in his frequent crying fits when he is unhappy in what his parents or other adults around him have done wrong, and in secret as Tarô provides an inner voice narrative of what he wants and believes as a baby which is often contrary to what Gorô or Chiyo believe Tarô wants or needs. Their situation gets more complicated as Gorô's aged and thus stuck in her ways mother Ino gets directly involved in Gorô, Chiyo and Tarô's home life and thus Tarô's upbringing.
- A Brooklyn answering service operator becomes involved in the lives of her clients, including a struggling playwright with whom she begins to fall in love.
- The story of the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing, based on Masuji Ibuse's novel.
- A biography of the English mathematician Alan Turing, who was one of the inventors of the digital computer and one of the key figures in the breaking of the Enigma code, used by the Germans to send secret orders to their U-boats in World War II. Turing was also a homosexual in Britain at a time when this was illegal.
- A very stylized TV version of the Fassbinder play. The set consists of a few pieces of furniture in front of a large screen on which coastal scenery is back projected. Geesche is a nineteenth century woman who wants to have a mind of her own. She defies convention and will do anything to achieve her freedom from oppression by her family and friends.
- Cabiria is a Roman child when her home is destroyed by a volcano. Sold in Carthage to be sacrificed in a temple, she is saved by Fulvio, a Roman spy. But danger lurks, and hatred between Rome and Carthage can only lead to war.
- A man falls for a woman while he is hiding among campers to elude his criminal pursuers.
- Max is a middle-aged unemployed actor who drives a cab in the daytime, and attempts stand-up comedy at night. His act falls flat until he discovers his talent for retelling the lives of his friends. These friends are all actors: Larry is in a TV soap, Anna is a confident older stage actress, Maggie is his ex-wife who never seems to get past an audition, and Celia is his new younger girlfriend.
- Tom is a working-class student in his last year at high school, and hopes to win a scholarship to the university. He and his friend Bill are obsessed with watching women, and blame their lack of success in seducing them on not having a car. Tom studies with the rather plain Cathy, but there is a casual camaraderie between them. Tom goes steady with the buxom Elaine, but never gets very far with her, as she is saving herself for marriage. Eventually Elaine persuades Tom to propose. Meanwhile, Cathy and Tom's playfulness goes too far, and she becomes pregnant. Bill's friends threaten to say that they all had sex with Cathy, if she forces Tom into marriage.
- A failed suicide attempt leads a heartbroken man to live a life in the wilderness.
- A bird catcher's empathy for the birds interferes with his livelihood.
- A documentary on China, concentrating mainly on the faces of the people, filmed in the areas they were allowed to visit. The 220-minute version consists of three parts. The first part, taken around Beijing, includes a cotton factory, older sections of the city, and a clinic where a Caesarean operation is performed using acupuncture. The middle part visits the Red Flag canal and a collective farm in Henan, as well as the old city of Suzhou. The final part shows the port and industries of Shanghai and ends with a stage presentation by Chinese acrobats.
- A governor's son falls in love and marries a beautiful girl, the daughter of a courtesan. Their marriage is kept a secret from the governor who would immediately disown him if he found that his son married beneath him.
- In the 1970s Harlem, garbage collector Roop feels intimidated by the idea of dating Claudine who is a single mother of six on welfare.
- An ambitious lumberjack abandons his saloon girl lover so that he can marry into wealth, but years later becomes infatuated with the woman's daughter.
- Claudia, a single bored Milan travel agent in her thirties, takes evening classes in Russian and tries to get to know her teacher Boris from Kiev. Boris says that he is reluctant to get involved with his student, but asks Claudia to put up his beautiful Ukrainian cousin Olga for a few days while he is away on business. The women get along quite well, but Claudia is distressed when Olga disappears without taking her suitcase, money or passport.
- Desperate to land a man on the moon before Russia does, NASA hastily preps a would-be spaceman for a mission that would leave him alone in a lunar shelter for a year.
- A documentary about Li Yang, who tries to teach large numbers of Chinese to speak English, using unusual methods. He holds motivational rallies, where he gets the crowd to shout out English phrases, in order to instill confidence, and tells them not to be afraid of losing face. His goal is to increase Chinese trade, and export Chinese culture, to the main world markets: North America, Japan, and Europe. After the rally, they can continue their English lessons using his taped courses.
- Kang-Yi is a teenage girl who lives in an apartment building in the port city of Keelung. Most of her family, and the people in the apartment, are blind, and she helps them out. Ah Ping, who was brought up on the mainland and only speaks Mandarin, comes back to Taiwan after dropping out of military academy. He stays in the same building, and starts to date Kang-Yi. This annoys one of her classmates, who claims she is his girl, and he gets his gang of thugs to bully Ah Ping.
- Marita Lorenz, the daughter of a German sea captain, recalls how she became the mistress of Fidel Castro in Havana soon after the Cuban revolution in 1959. After being six months pregnant with his baby, she was drugged and given a near fatal abortion. She was then recruited by the CIA and Mafia to assassinate Castro, but she threw away the poison pills just before she met Fidel. She then worked for the CIA in Florida and, in 1962, had a daughter while she was the mistress of an ex-dictator of Venezuela. She later married an FBI agent, by whom she had a son, and they spied on UN diplomats in a New York apartment. She claimed her spying days were over when she testified, in the 1977 Kennedy Assassination Inquiry, about her connection to Frank Sturgis and Lee Harvey Oswald.
- Senor Quexana has read so many books on chivalry that he believes that he is the knight Don Quixote de la Mancha. So Don Quixote sets off on his horse, accompanied by his squire Sancho Panza on a mule, to perform valiant deeds. They mistakenly save the Lady Altisidora who is so amused that she invites them to visit the Duke to provide some merriment at court. Among other deeds, Don Quixote frees some prisoners, who then turn upon him, and Don Quixote attacks a windmill that he imagines is a monstrous wizard.
- In Paris in 1887, Irène works as a governess to Douce, the grand-daughter of the dowager Countess de Bonafé. Douce believes she is in love with Fabien, the handsome manager of the estate. However she cannot hope to marry him because of their class difference. Douce's widowed father, the Count de Bonafé, has a wooden leg, and is infatuated with Irène. Douce discovers that Fabien is planning to flee to Quebec with Irène, and also finds out that the Count has asked Irène to marry him. So Douce tells Fabien this and convinces him to run away with her, causing consternation in the family.
- As a car full of an assortment of characters rolls down an embankment and bursts into flames, the old driver says "See You in Hell, Friends." The relations between the characters are shown in flashbacks. The pretty Rita and her fiancee Petras meet the old colonel, and come to live in his farmhouse. Rita marries the colonel as well as her fiancee, and has a daughter Christine. The colonel's supposed father shows up, and also makes amorous advances on Rita. They all live blissfully together until two holy women with axes arrive. The women start chopping down trees to build an ark. Rita starts having nightmares and Christine is crucified.
- A senior chef lives with his three grown daughters; the middle one finds her future plans affected by unexpected events and the life changes of the other household members.
- In the nineteenth century, seventeen year old Effi Briest is married to the older Baron von Instetten and moves into a house, that she believes has a ghost, in a small isolated Baltic town. She soon bears a daughter, Annie, and hires the lapsed Catholic Roswitha to look after her. Effi is lonely when her husband is away on business, so she spends time riding and walking along the shore with Major Crampas. Instetten is promoted to Ministerial Councillor and the family moves to Berlin, where Effi enjoys the social life. Six years later, the Baron is given letters from Crampas to Effi that convince him that they had an affair. He feels obliged to challenge Crampas to a duel and banish Effi from the house.