In a totalitarian future society, a man whose daily work is rewriting history tries to rebel by falling in love.

A police detective falls in love with the woman whose murder he's investigating.

In the early 1900s, the fictional Catfish Row section of Charleston, South Carolina serves as home to a black fishing community. Crippled beggar Porgy, who travels about in a goat-drawn cart, loves the drug-addicted Bess, who lives with stevedore Crown, the local bully.

A teenage skateboarder becomes suspected of being connected with a security guard who suffered a brutal death in a skate park called "Paranoid Park".

The story is set at the beginning of the 20th century in Sicily. Salvatore, a very poor farmer, and a widower, decides to emigrate to the US with all his family, including his old mother. Before they embark, they meet Lucy. She is supposed to be a British lady and wants to come back to the States. Lucy, or Luce as Salvatore calls her, for unknown reasons wants to marry someone before to arrive to Ellis Island in New York. Salvatore accepts the proposal. Once they arrive in Ellis Island they spend the quarantine period trying to pass the examinations to be admitted to the States. Tests are not so simple for poor farmers coming from Sicily. Their destiny is in the hands of the custom officers.

In 1970s Iran, Marjane 'Marji' Satrapi watches events through her young eyes and her idealistic family of a long dream being fulfilled of the hated Shah's defeat in the Iranian Revolution of 1979. However as Marji grows up, she witnesses first hand how the new Iran, now ruled by Islamic fundamentalists, has become a repressive tyranny on its own.

Shehata is a committed employee in a private hospital. He lives with his daughter Nemat and his wife. One day Hussein proposes to his daughter, but the problem is that Shehata is unable to prepare his daughter, which prompts him to ask for an advance from the company. After management refuses, one of the bribed employees takes advantage of the opportunity and offers Shehata received a sum of money in exchange for a trust receipt, which he quickly used against him, especially after Shehata discovered that an incident of embezzlement had occurred.

In the wake of the Cairo Fire, Essam feels guilty for betraying his friend Samir by messing around with his wife Madiha. Essam decides to take revenge on Madiha's father who pressured him to marry her to avoid a scandal.

Zuhra has nothing to do but to runaway after her family forced her to marry an old rich man. She goes to Alexandria where she works in a motel and there she meets people with different ideologies and thoughts about life.

Abbas, a resident of Cairo, is appointed by the government to hold the office of supervisor in a post office in a small village in Upper Egypt.

A teenager fails to find (and keep) jobs which makes his father doubt the reason might be the boy's lack of sexual experience. As all his efforts prove to be unsuccessful, the father gives up, but not the boy's aunt.

Cecilia arrives in Guadalajara for the first time to study at the Faculty of Literature and become a writer. There she meets Nicolás and Aristeo, young men who claim to be the founders—though in reality the only members—of the Underground Ultraism, a literary movement that aims to change Mexican literature. Through them, she meets Pita, an irreverent and openly bisexual poet with whom she forms a genuine bond. Cecilia finds a new sense of belonging in this group, until the friendship holding it together begins to fracture under the weight of envy.