Khadiga lives in a poor neighborhood with her parents. She tries to save up money so she could marry her sweetheart Taha. Taha buys a lottery ticket in hope of winning a lot of money, but it ends up in Khadiga's religious father's hands who throws it away. The ticket gets picked up by the town's fool, who gets lucky and wins, driving the town into chaos.
A woman aspires to get rich and surrenders to a wealthy old man who will marry her. The wife has a daughter from another man who denies her paternity, and the old man has a son and a daughter from a former wife.
A rough criminal gets a second chance at life thanks to a kindly (and wealthy) lady saloon patron. But he hasn't gone straight yet, as he and a partner attempt to rob the home of a rich homeowner-- whose wife is asleep in the next room.
The son of a working-class British mining family has dreams of pursuing an art career, but when he strikes up an affair with an older, married woman from the town it enrages his kind but possessive mother.
A cardinal is arrested for treason against the state. He is a popular hero of his people, for his resistance against the Nazis during the war and his resistance when his country again fell to a totalitarian conqueror.
After a prank makes Joey Norton believe he killed his older brother, he runs away from home and spends the day at Coney Island while his brother tries to find him before their mother gets home.
A woman impressed by news reports about flying saucers, gets hit on the head by a vase, passes out and dreams that she is the 'Queen of Mars', from where she sends an expedition to Earth in order to bring back Rio's Carnaval to the planet.
While her new husband is away looking for work, the wife loses the child she was expecting and uses another woman's baby as a substitute so she won't have to upset her spouse when he returns.
Having helped his brother King Edward IV take the throne of England, the jealous hunchback Richard, Duke of Gloucester, plots to seize power for himself.
A man embezzles some money in order to pay his debts and the daughter of his boss, who is in love with his son, asks a rich former suitor of hers for help.
Krestan Serbin, a 64-year-old Sorbian farm-worker, considers himself non-political. He owns a few acres, a few pigs and a cow, and intends to pass all this on to his daughter Lena.