In nineteenth-century Łódź, Poland, three friends want to make a lot of money by building and investing in a textile factory. An exceptional portrait of rapid industrial expansion is shown through the eyes of one Polish town.

In the early years of the 20th century, Mohandas K. Gandhi, a British-trained lawyer, forsakes all worldly possessions to take up the cause of Indian independence. Faced with armed resistance from the British government, Gandhi adopts a policy of 'passive resistance', endeavouring to win freedom for his people without resorting to bloodshed.

A solitary nurse bonds with a badly burned patient who survived an accident on an oil rig.

County Durham, England, 1984. The miners' strike has started and the police have started coming up from Bethnal Green, starting a class war with the lower classes suffering. Caught in the middle of the conflict is 11-year old Billy Elliot, who, after leaving his boxing club for the day, stumbles upon a ballet class and finds out that he's naturally talented. He practices with his teacher Mrs. Wilkinson for an upcoming audition in Newcastle-upon Tyne for the royal Ballet school in London.

In Warsaw in 1980, the Communist Party sends disgruntled radio reporter Winkel to Gdańsk to dig up dirt on the shipyard strikers - particularly on Maciek Tomczyk, an independent labour union leader whose father was killed in the December 1970 protests. Posing as sympathetic, Winkel interviews the people surrounding Tomczyk, including his detained wife, Agnieszka.

Trevor, an insomniac lathe operator, experiences unusual occurrences at work and home. A strange man follows him everywhere, but no one else seems to notice him.

A deaf man and his girlfriend resort to desperate measures in order to fund a kidney transplant for his sister. Things go horribly wrong, and the situation spirals rapidly into a cycle of violence and revenge.

A teacher is handing out examination results to his students in an industrial school and he points out to them that work is the most important thing in a person's life. Karel is pleased with his results but Vláďa's are bad. During the holidays Karel goes off to a factory to get work experience. Vláďa prefers to laze about and read poetry. In the end, however, he decides to follow Karel's example. At first the work doesn't agree with him, but after a few days, he gets used to it and finally he is glad to be able to work in the factory. One day he is injured at work and in hospital he has time to think about his future. He tells Karel, who visits him in hospital, that he has decided not to carry on with studies which don't interest him. He feels he will be more useful if he stays on at the factory.

La Califfa's husband was killed during the strikes so she takes the side of the strikers. Her conflict with the plant owner Doverdo gradually turns into a love relationship.

A bumbling tramp desires to build a home with a young woman, yet is thwarted time and time again by his lack of experience and habit of being in the wrong place at the wrong time...

Set against the backdrop of an increasingly violent strike, a worker falls in love with the middle-class daughter of his landlady.

The true story of how businessman Oskar Schindler saved over a thousand Jewish lives from the Nazis while they worked as slaves in his factory during World War II.