Barents Sea, August 12th, 2000. During a Russian naval exercise, and after suffering a serious accident, the K-141 Kursk submarine sinks with 118 crew members on board. While the few sailors who are still alive barely manage to survive, their families push for accurate information and a British...
Georges has Down syndrome, living at a mental-institution, Harry is a busy businessman, giving lectures for young aspiring salesmen. He is successful in his business life, but his social life is a disaster since his wife left him and took their two children with her. This weekend his children came...
80-year-old Thomas recounts his childhood and middle age through a series of flashbacks and dream sequences. Thomas believes he’s been taken away from a better life at birth; following a hospital fire, he vividly recalls being swapped with another new-born, and subsequently grows up in a poorer...
Patrick is the handyman on his father's naturist campsite. The remaining time he dedicates to his hobby, designing and creating wooden furniture. When Patrick loses his campsite hammer, his quest to retrieve it takes him to the farthest corners of the camping grounds.
Colin, an ambitious young American businessman, has a deal with a potential client, a rich Arab sheikh who is a passionate pigeon fancier. The sheikh has tried several times to buy a champion pigeon, but the owner continues to stubbornly refuse his offer. In an attempt to gain the trust of the...
Three 'Bukowskian' torrid nights in the life of a man in search of love. Harry Voss, 12, is young and naive. Love, for him, is romantic love between princes and princesses demurely kissing each other on the mouth. His father is a hero who kidnapped his mother and married her on a lonely mountain...
Four lighthearted stories set in the idyllic Italian countryside: an old grouch is befriended by a stray dog; a lonely widow spies on her newly-wed son and daughter-in-law; a German tourist tries to seduce a younger nurse. The fourth segment was cut in the US by its distributor Miramax.
An isolated farmhouse is chosen as a hide-out by criminals Jim and Charlie after an armed robbery. The Deleye family are forced to accept the situation under Jim's brutal domination.
Writer Joris (the author's alter-ego) has packed in his job and left his routine. He wanders through Brussels, pretending to be in other places and as far as we can verify lying to everyone. He stays in a dead-beat motel and meets other absurd people, never to any actual end. Will it be different...
Rocklin Colorado, 1925. A hard cold winter. Young Arturo Bandini loves his father Svevo, his mother Maria and his brothers. Even though his bricklayer father wastes the little money he has in the Imperial Poolhall and his time with the rich American widow, Hildegarde. Even though his beautiful and...
Hector's parents sent him to an orphanage in treatment for smallpox but... they never picked him up. 35 years later, he still lives in the orphanage, surrounded by children, his playmates. Till a forgotten aunt remembers that he exists. She'll get him to participate in the bakery of her husband,...
Jean is a family man and factory worker who dreams of becoming a songwriter. Pinning his hopes on his teenage daughter, Marva, he takes her to singing contests in which the awkward and overweight girl struggles to belt out a tune. When Jean is suddenly fired because of cut backs, he is ashamed and...
An Ukranian woman enters Belgium illegally and hides in the van of a driver abandoned by his wife. He ends up helping her to find her husband who had emigrated long before. They are joined by his wacky Spanish mother and cute young daughter.
'Cargo' brings the raw story of three brothers who own a family business in the fishery and are trying to save it from destruction. The passion for their profession but also for their loved ones, however, drives them to desperate actions.
At the Paris airport Orly, a woman falls for a stranger, a family heads to a funeral, a couple lose touch, a wife reads her husband’s break-up letter. All wait for their planes. Absorbed in their immediate fates, they move through the impeccably structured space, unaware of a looming threat...
A village outside Brussels is rocked when a child is killed in a hit-and-run accident and its inhabitants react in a variety of ways to the tragic news.
It's about a girl, S., who is dangling between Brussels and New York, boys and girls, love and hate, life and death. She has a mother, a father, a boyfriend and a girlfriend, but none of them are any good to her.