The Runaway (2004)

Peppino, a retired hitman for the Camorra, has now fully passed on his job and know-how to his single son, Nino. But when Nino is brutally assassinated, the old man is back in business to take revenge. Aside his everlasting love Rita and his longtime henchman Totò, Peppino will go to any lengths, even if it means bringing the Camorra down.

Viktor spends his free time trawling bars with ladies of questionable repute, from where he is picked up by a wife he doesn’t love, the mother of a child they never planned. Viktor himself was abandoned by his own father, his mother then committed suicide, and he was left to grow up in an orphanage. Years later, his errant dad returns, now a disabled felon, and Viktor discovers a timely legacy is in the offing – his father’s apartment. The documentation for securing dad’s move into an old people’s home is signed in a flash. Nevertheless, the only one that can take him is miles away and, what’s more, the invalid starts to recuperate during the journey, which is when their real problems begin.

Yuli is the nickname given to Carlos Acosta by his father, Pedro, who considers him the son of Ogun, an African god and a fighter. As a child Yuli avoids discipline and education, learning from the streets of an impoverished and abandoned Havana. His father, however, has other ideas, and knowing that his son has a natural talent for dance, sends him to the National Ballet School of Cuba. Despite his repeated escapes and initial poor behaviour, the boy is inevitably drawn to the world of dance, and begins to shape his legendary career from a young age, becoming the first black dancer to be cast in some of the most prestigious ballet roles, originally written for white dancers, in companies such as the Houston Ballet or the Royal Ballet in London.

Gabriele Santoro is a Professor of Pianoforte at the Music Conservatory San Pietro a Majella who lives in a working-class area of the city. One morning, while shaving his beard, the postman buzzes at the intercom to tell him he has a package. Gabriele opens the door and, before greeting him, runs to rinse his face. In that short space of time, a ten-year-old child slips into his apartment and hides away. “The maestro” – as he’s called in his neighbourhood – only notices the stowaway late at night. And when he sees him, he recognises the intruder as Ciro, a child who lives with his parents and siblings on the top floor of his building. When asked why he has fled his home, Ciro refuses to speak. Nevertheless, the maestro instinctively decides to hide him in his home, setting Ciro’s enemies a uniquely difficult challenge.

Yuri, 16, has lived all his life in Gagarin Towers, a vast red-brick housing project on the outskirts of Paris. He dreams of becoming an astronaut. When plans to demolish Gagarin Towers leak out, Yuri joins the resistance. With his friends Diana and Houssam, he embarks on a mission to save their home, which has become his “starship.”

While a South Korean man wanders the city in search of the woman he just broke up with, she successively meets and flirts with two men who claim to have met her before.

The sierras of southern Brazil, 1963. The son of an French man and a Brazilian woman, Tony is a young man with a profound love of cinema and poetry. After graduating from college he returns to his small town in rural Brazil, to find out that his father had left for good, back to France. Tony then looks for the company of his fathers friends in search of information and references of a lost male role-model. He becomes a school teacher and a male figure to kids, in an attempt to provide them with something he lacks himself. A series of developments lead him to a surprising final lead on his fathers' whereabouts and reasons for leaving.

After tragedy strikes Henry and Penny, he befriends a tenacious young girl and discovers she is constructing a raft to sail across the Atlantic to find her lost father. Together, along with some unlikely friends, they set forth to construct the vessel and subsequently rebuild their lives.

Gabriel, aged 10, lives in a comfortable ex-pat neighborhood in Burundi, his ‘small country’. Gabriel is a normal kid, happy, carefree and having adventures with his friends and little sister. Then in 1993, tensions in neighboring Rwanda spill over, threatening his family and his innocence.

Fúsi finds comfort in the familiarity of his routines, until an involuntary dance class forces him to encounter the real world.