On a ship in the 1930s sailing from Alexandria to Marseille, Édouard Binet, a French adventurer, meets Nemrod Loktum, a shady Egyptian businessman, and Sylvie Baron, a Belgian exotic dancer. Nemrod takes the Étoile du Nord train to Brussels, on which he is robbed and killed. Édouard then takes a room at the boarding house in Charleroi of Madame Baron, Sylvie’s mother, with bloodstained clothes and a lot of money that he hides. Despite the suspicions of her younger daughter Antoinette and the other lodgers, the frosty Madame Baron is gradually charmed by the suave Frenchman and believes his stories. The police learn of his presence and, after trial, he is sent to the infamous Île de Ré for transportation to the penal colonies. Madame Baron is among the grieving relatives who wave goodbye.
Like Voltaire‘s Candide in his eponymous novel, Jallel, a young North-African man, dreaming of better prospects, immigrates illegally to France. He struggles at first as he is unable to find work and finds it difficult to make friends. But soon he gets to sell fruits in the underground, albeit illegally. He also makes some new friendsand then falls in love. But his dreams of success remain unrealized as he comes to discover and share the solidarity of the other outcasts going from one encounter to the other, making his way through Paris, from hostels to immigrant aid societies and social welfare groups, living among the excluded and the destitute.
Whitney, at the time a Wall Street executive, returns to his rural hometown of Carlotta, California, and interviews his family members about his maternal stepgrandfather, Melvin E. Just. Just sexually abused 10 of Whitney's relatives, including his mother, uncle, aunts and step-aunts, some as young as 2 years old. The consequeneces have resulted in dysfunction spanning three generations of the family. Whitney reveals he was also molested by his uncle, who now lives incestuously with his half-sister. Whitney's aunts discuss their struggles with alcohol and drug addiction, and bouts of homelessness and prostitution.
In 2004, Alice Whinnett was diagnosed with dementia. Over the following decade her condition naturally worsened, and everything in her world changed, all apart from how her "favourite grandson" behaved with her. In this short documentary, grandson Thomas McNaught gives a brief look at the relationship between his 84-year-old grandmother and himself, showing a lighter side to the disease that breaks so many families apart.
While Lowell is generally known for its central role in the Industrial Revolution as the first planned textile town in the United States, the city had fallen on hard times since the mills left the city in the early 1920s. Wang Laboratories, a major employer in Lowell in the more prosperous 1980s, declared bankruptcy and virtually went out of business in the early 1990s. The Lowell of 1995 had a large percentage of the population unemployed or underemployed, in poverty, and unaffected by positive things in the city like the Lowell National Historical Park and The Lowell Folk Festival (established in 1990). Much of the film takes place in a lower-class section of the city's (Lower) Highlands neighborhood.
Franny Basilio (Amanda Plummer) is determined to help her musically gifted autistic sister Rosetta (Megan Follows) have a life of her own. Their mother Regina (Teresa Stratas), who gave up a promising career as an opera singer to raise her children, refuses to acknowledge Rosetta’s talent and believes she will never be capable of looking after herself. Franny vehemently disagrees with her mother, which has caused friction between them since she was a child. Eventually, Regina’s bitterness, ignorance and desire for acknowledgement of her own talent cause a rift between her and her daughters. Franny ultimately moves out of the house causing Rosetta to hurt herself in a desperate cry for help. Rosetta is hospitalized and assessed by doctors who recommend to Regina that her daughter be lobotomized for her own good. Franny must summon all of her courage in order to prevent her mother from allowing Rosetta to have the operation and be committed to an institution for the rest of her life.
The story of a man who wakes up in bed suffering from memory loss after being in an accident, only to begin to suspect that his wife may not be his real wife and that a web of lies and deceit deepen inside the house where he soon finds himself a prisoner.