Marjatta lives in poor conditions in Tampere with her widowed father Arttu who works as a factory worker. Marjatta gets to know engineering student Pauli whose constantly worsening mental health problems and jealousy become a threat to Marjatta and her close circle.
Convicted murderer Clyde Thompson receives the death penalty for shooting two men in Texas in 1928. When the governor spares his life, Thompson gains a reputation as the meanest man in the state while working hard labor in prison.
Lina is in her best age, mid-30s. She is strong-willed, resilient and self-conscious. There has never been a man in her life, on the contrary, she even had to play the man's role on the small farm to sustain herself and the parents.
The Way of Drama unfolds in the world of kabuki in Osaka, but also addresses the politics of popular culture and the rivalry between theatrical styles like those used by amateur actors to dramatise contemporary events.
In 1947 Prague, Holocaust survivor Dita lives in a hostel for orphans, acting as a protective mentor to a younger girl while failing to fix her own shattered life.
Alan Clay, a struggling American businessman, travels to Saudi Arabia to sell a new technology to the King, only to be challenged by endless Middle Eastern bureaucracy, a perpetually absent monarch, and a suspicious growth on his back.
Young forester Sixt is wounded one night. Smuggling in the mountains is the reason. By day, the brothers Benno and Simon Schaidler are respectable citizens - by night, they are smugglers and poachers.
The old and sick detective superintendent Bärlach has to investigate the murder of his colleague Ulrich Schmied, who was murdered in the middle of the country road.
A young street vendor who is a cockfighting aficionado, attracted by the image of one of them, settles on the ranch of its owner where he falls in love with the foreman's daughter.