Gasping for Air

An adaptation of the short story with the same name by Portuguese writer Lídia Jorge.

13-year-old Lucas makes a new friend in his classmate Lais, and joins her on an epic journey to find the father she has never known.

17-year-old Sara leads a sheltered existence with her family, members of Jehovah’s Witnesses, when she meets the outsider Teis and falls in love. Sara, herself a believer, now faces an important turning point in her life as she is forced to choose between religion and love.

Set in the early 1960s, the story revolves around high school sweethearts Jonas and Agnete, their friendships and families, trials and tribulations.

Two African-American teenage boys are suddenly and mysteriously abandoned by their parents. The two have to learn how to survive on their own. From this desertion, comes an experience of beauty, meaning and enduring love.

One summer, a French teenager who has been living with his mother in the city moves in with his estranged father’s family in the countryside, where he clashes with his stepmother.

In a youth correctional facility, Joe is preparing his return to society. But William’s arrival turns his desire for freedom into desire of another kind. Behind fences and cell walls, passions begin to play havoc with the need for liberty.

Fatima-Zahra and her teenage son Selim move from place to place, forever trying to outrun the latest scandal she’s caught up in. When Selim discovers the truth about their past, Fatima-Zahra vows to make a fresh start. In Tangier, new opportunities promise the legitimacy they each crave but not without pushing the volatile mother-son relationship to the breaking point.

A teenage boy and his mother are on the run. The father is violent and has a history of beating up his wife. They manage to get away from him and drive far away, until they arrive in a small town where they settle down. They rent a house from a nice man and soon they forget everything that has happened in the past, until the boy begins to have bad dreams of his father.

Denmark, 1961. Bjørn, a middle-class boy in his early teens, wants to be accepted by Steen, a bullying peer of his with wealthy but freezingly cold parents. Bjørn's other good friend is Mulle, a cheerful and more childish working-class boy. All three seem friends at first, but gradually Steen starts pushing Mulle away while pulling the impressionable Bjørn with him towards more and more violence.

A boy struggles to reconcile his burgeoning queer identity with his filial duties and expectations from his Chinese immigrant mother.

In Sara's class, the popular kids, also known as the kings and queens, are subjected to daily humiliations, which include having their pants pulled down or water thrown on them, but this is only a sign of their elevated status. Sara is the only blond and blue-eyed girl in her class, and she is completely overlooked by the kings and queens who do not have blond hair and blue eyes. She has a secret crush on one of the kings, who is way out of her league, and she doesn't have any friends either, but would like to become friends with Karen, also an outsider who aspires to a better status. One day, Sara eyes an opportunity to boost her popularity by humiliating herself and thereby become queen. Karen instantly becomes her friend, she seems to catch the eye of her kingly crush and popularity appears within her reach. However, her happiness is short-lived, and in the end she learns a far more valuable lesson than how to be queen for a day.