Surviving Desire

Antoine - a grieving loner - spends his days in a cafe on Place Clichy watching people. Every day, he sees a woman he calls Albertine get out of the subway and go to the movies. Today, he takes it upon himself to talk to her. Thus began Antoine's down-going.

When teacher Simon arrives in a small, secluded village to take over the local school, he is surprised to discover that his predecessor has disappeared without a trace - and that nobody seems too concerned about it. As Simon probes deeper into the disappearance, the inhabitants of a forbidding estate called "Summerfield" take on more and more significance.

Graduate student Harry Bailey was once one of the most visible undergraduate activists on campus, but now that he's back studying for his master's, he's trying to fly right. Trouble is, the campus is exploding with various student movements, and Harry's girlfriend, Jan, is caught up in most of them. As Harry gets closer to finishing his degree, he finds his iconoclastic attitude increasingly aligned with the students rather than the faculty.

Lena, aged twenty, wants to know all she can about life and reality. She collects information on everyone and everything, storing her findings in an enormous archive. She experiments with relationships, political activism, and meditation. Meanwhile, the actors, director and crew are shown in a humorous parallel plot about the making of the film and their reactions to the story and each other. Nudity, explicit sex, and controversial politics kept this film from being shown in the US while its seizure by Customs was appealed.

An astrophysics professor leads a lecture about a black hole that absorbs everything around it. He doesn't know yet that he will also be enveloped by this black hole.

High-school students start a vigilante group in their neighbourhood but, as their power increases, they become more abusive and dangerous.

One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: "Who are you? and "Where does the world come from?

Renata and Gabriel, a young couple of actors, arrives to their apartment ready to have a night of pleasure, until she finds an used condom that makes all their relationship's secrets emerge.

Two spoiled Beverly Hills sisters who have been left penniless after their father's sudden death are forced to move in with their estranged aunt in East Los Angeles.

Vasco is a medical student in Lisbon, supported by his rich aunts, whom he had falsely told he had already graduated. In fact, he devotes himself to a bohemian life, preferring the popular fairs and pretty women, especially Alice, a seamstress from the Castelinhos quarter, which rather upsets her ambitious father, tailor Caetano, who is familiar with Vasco's debts. After failing yet another final exam, he is surprised by his aunts' announcement that they will visit him in Lisbon to see his practice.

When Sara, a young design student from Iowa, arrives for college in Los Angeles, she is eager to fit in and get to know the big city. Her wealthy roommate, Rebecca, is more than eager to take Sara under her wing and show her the ropes. The two become close, but when Sara begins to branch out and make more friends on campus, Rebecca becomes resentful. Alarmed, Sara moves in with her new boyfriend, causing Rebecca's behavior to take a violent turn.

The Pollard family is calmly discussing their impending death by atom bomb when Mrs. Pollard recounts a dream in which she sensually bathes herself in the "Tears of Neglected Children."