In medieval Sweden, a knight returns from war only to find a ravaged homeland. He meets up with a group of travelling players and eventually confronts the embodiment of death with whom he engages in a game of chess for his life. The knight and Death play as the cultural turmoil envelopes the people around them as they try, in different ways, to deal with the upheaval the plague has caused.

An extremely crass and frustrated oil worker, and failed child pianist hiding from his past in Texas. Robert Dupea spends his life drinking beer and sleeping with (and cheating on) his annoying but adoring wannabe girlfriend, but when he learns that his father is dying in Washington State, he leaves because leaving is what Dupea does best, from his problems, fears, and those who love him.

Centers on the dilemma of a young ballerina torn between the composer who loves her and the impresario determined to fashion her into a great dancer.

Mona, an aimless drifter in the French countryside, deeply touches the lives of the people she meets and confronts them with her own ideas of freedom.

A soldier-boy earns a ten-day leave to go home to his mother by performing a desparate act of bravery at the front. On the way home he has many small adventures.

Told through the eyes of Alexander and his sister Fanny, we see the exuberant and colorful Ekdahl household in a Swedish town early in the twentieth century. Their parents, Oscar and Emilie, are the director and the leading lady of the local theatre company. Oscar's mother and brother are its chief patrons. After Oscar's early death, his widow marries the bishop and moves with her children to his austere and forbidding chancery. The children are immediately...

A pair of down-on-their-luck swordsmen arrive in a dusty, windblown town, where they become involved in a local clan dispute. One, a former farmer, dreams of being a samurai. The other, a former samurai, prefers living anonymously.

A schizophrenic man attempts to track down his young daughter after he is released from an institution.

The chilling story of a Japanese soldier facing death and cannibalism in a Philippine jungle, after he is denied treatment for tuberculosis. Japanese troops are in retreat in the Philippines. Supplies run out and discipline crumbles.

Told in three parts, a mysterious incident in the Macedonian mountains blows out of proportion, eventually threatening a full-blown civil war. A silent young monk offers protection to an ethnic Albanian girl who is suspected of murder. A London photojournalist who is pregnant, needs to deal with her estranged husband and desires permanence with her lover. Her lover is a prize-winning Macedonian photographer, just back from Bosnia, who finds himself...