The Swiss Agency for Development & Cooperation

A few minutes in the life of two people: a young woman who has her whole life in front of her and an old man ill with asthma who has only one more night to live.

Tao Lan and Yu Xiaoqin are teenage stepsisters. They attend the same high school and share a room, yet they couldn't be more different. The former is wild and a bit of a drifter, while the latter is diligent and studious. One day, Yu Xiaoqin steals money from her father and blames Tao Lan.

Mira returns home to Dushanbe from Russia to visit her father, a wastrel who is completely addicted to a game called "odds and evens," or Kosh ba Kosh. When another player comes to collect on gambling debts and finds nothing of value, he sets his sights on Mira.

Nilufar, a girl living downtown, is about to marry a man living uptown. But one day, soldiers come and plant barbed wire to separate the two towns. The life of the people, who have thus far enjoyed peace, now falls into severe chaos. Students must take classes with barbed wire in the middle of the classroom, and it becomes difficult to go to the hospital. However, the biggest problem is Nilufar's wedding. Kirill, the chief of the climate observatory, tries his best to help her wedding, but then a terrible tragedy occurs.

A country boy tries to find his place in Buenos Aires. He goes to live with his cousin in the outer suburbs and works as a parapalos ("pin setter") in one of the city's last hand-operated bowling alleys.

An anthropologist investigates the origins of human evolution. She had suffered a mental trauma during her childhood when her father, a submarine captain, died during the war. This trauma periodically destabilizes her condition. The ghosts of a prehistoric past and a violent death collide in the subconsciousness of the scientist to give birth to an unexpected theory of the origins of human beings.

In rural Afghanistan, people are storytellers who make up and tell each other tales of mystery and imagination to explain the world in which they live. The shepherd children own the mountains and, although no adults are around, they know the rules; they know that boys and girls are not allowed to be together. The boys practice with their slings to fight wolves. The girls smoke secretly and play at getting married, dreaming of finding a husband soon. They gossip about Sediqa; she’s eleven years old and an outsider. The girls think she is cursed. Qodrat, also eleven years old, becomes the subject of gossip when his mother remarries an old man with two wives. Qodrat roams alone in the most isolated parts of the mountains, where he meets Sediqa and they become friends.

The road linking Bulgaria, Macedonia and Albania corresponds to the site of a huge EU infrastructure project called Corridor #8. Corridor No. 8+ is a mosaic film combining fragments from the everyday lives of the characters who live along this non-existent Balkan road. MUBI

Working day of young shoeshiners in Bolivia.