Sophie, a quiet and shy maid working for an upper-class French family, finds a friend in the energetic and uncompromising postmaster Jeanne, who encourages her to stand up against her bourgeois employers.

The daughter of a Nevada casino owner gets involved with a racketeer, despite everyone's efforts to separate them.

A gambler and a prostitute become thriving business partners in a remote Old West mining town until a large corporation arrives on the scene.

Bullied at school and ignored and abused at home by his indifferent mother and older brother, Billy Casper, a 15-year-old working-class Yorkshire boy, tames and trains his pet kestrel falcon whom he names Kes. Helped and encouraged by his English teacher and his fellow students, Billy finally finds a positive purpose to his unhappy existence.

Young women in a small Japanese town look to revive their home's declining fortunes by building a Hawaiian village tourist attraction.

In Harlem in 1987, Claireece "Precious" Jones is a 16-year-old African American girl born into a life no one would want. She's pregnant for the second time by her absent father, and at home she must wait hand and foot on her mother, an angry woman who abuses her emotionally and physically. School is chaotic and Precious has reached the ninth grade with good marks and a secret – she can't read.

A young schoolteacher descends into personal moral degradation after finding himself stranded in a brutal, menacing town in outback Australia.

Growing up in the sheltered confines of a 1920s English coal-mining community, free-spirited sisters Gudrun and Ursula explore erotic love with a wealthy playboy and a philosophical educator, with cataclysmic results for all four.

After being abandoned in the desert by his abusive stepfather, Phillip finds himself cruelly cast into a game of life or death until a beautiful orphan named Lucy and her boyfriend Jack come to his rescue. The three runaways patrol the desert and live as petty thieves, but they soon find that the fight for survival against nature may become a fight for survival against each other.

A-yuan and A-yun are both from the small mining town of Jio-fen. They move to Taipei, where A-yuan is an apprentice by day and goes to night school, and A-yun works as a helper at a tailors. Everyone thinks they are meant for each other, and so do they. They fail to see time and fate are beyond their control.

While coal fires burn beneath a depressed mining town a greedy businessman stops at nothing to buy up the mineral rights.

Northern China, 2004. When miner Zhang Baomin returns to his home, a small and isolated mining village, his wife tells him that their son has mysteriously disappeared while shepherding his small flock.