During the 1976 Soweto uprising, a white school teacher's life and values are threatened when he asks questions about the death of a young black boy who died in police custody.
In order to be reinstated to the bar and recover custody of her daughter, a hotshot lawyer, now in recovery and on probation, must take on the appeal of a woman wrongfully convicted of murder.
A rural widow sends her only son to Tokyo to receive a better education. Years later, she visits him and finds he has become a night school teacher struggling to support his wife and son.
A man reflects on the lost love of his youth and his long-ago journey from Taiwan to America as he begins to reconnect with his estranged daughter.
An elderly couple journey to Tokyo to visit their grown children, only to find them preoccupied and self-involved.
Yokohama, 1963. Japan is picking itself up from the devastation of World War II and preparing to host the 1964 Olympics—and the mood is one of both optimism and conflict as the young generation struggles to throw off the shackles of a troubled past. Against this backdrop of hope and change, a friendship begins to blossom between high school students Umi and Shun—but a buried secret from their past emerges to cast a shadow on the future and pull them apart.
In a suburban landscape, the lives of several families interlace with loss, despair and personal crisis. Esther Gold has lost focus on all but caring for her comatose son, Paul, and neglects her daughter and husband. Lawyer Jim Train is devoted to his career, not his family. Helen Christianson wants to find a new spark in life, while Annette Jennings tries to rebuild hers.
Back from a tour of duty, Kelli struggles to find her place in her family and the rust-belt town she no longer recognizes.
Years after her son's suicide, a woman longs to confront both the past and a friend of his who took his business idea.
A poor, struggling South Carolinian mother and daughter face painful choices with their resolve and pride. Bone, the eldest daughter, and Anney her tired mother, grow both closer and farther apart: Anney sees Glen as her last chance.
Kiyoha rises from the lowly courtesan ranks to the high class position of Oiran in the steamy red-light district of Yoshiwara. She is determined to stand on her own two feet and live life as she pleased.
Set in postwar America, a man watches his seemingly perfect life fall apart as his daughter's new political affiliation threatens to destroy their family.
Set in Tokyo in 1940, the peaceful life of the Nogami Family suddenly changes when the father, Shigeru, is arrested and accused of being a Communist. His wife Kayo works frantically from morning to night to maintain the household and bring up her two daughters with the support of Shigeru's sister Hisako and Shigeru's ex-student Yamazaki, but her husband does not return. WWII breaks out and casts dark shadows on the entire country, but Kayo still tries to keep her cheerful determination, and sustain the family with her love. This is an emotional drama of a mother and an eternal message for peace.
A troubled young woman becomes obsessed with her mysterious new neighbor, who bears a striking resemblance to the girl's dead mother.
The true story of 20-year-old Colleen Stan, a hitchhiking woman abducted by a young couple and held captive for seven years, during which time she's tortured and forced to live as a slave to her captors.
Hisako loses her home in Tokyo to Allied bombing. With her husband fighting somewhere in Asia, she and her two children evacuate to a suburb of Kobe, where they share a house with Hisako's cousin, Kyoko. Kobe is bombed and Kyoko is killed. Hisako is forced to take care of Kyoko's two children in addition to her own, but there is not enough food for everyone.
The elderly Shukishi and his wife, Tomi, take the long journey from their small seaside village to visit their adult children in Tokyo. Their elder son, Koichi, a doctor, and their daughter, Shige, a hairdresser, don't have much time to spend with their aged parents, and so it falls to Noriko, the widow of their younger son who was killed in the war, to keep her in-laws company.
The rise and fall of salsa singer, Héctor Lavoe (1946-1993), as told from the perspective of his wife Puchi, who looks back from 2002.
After her anti-fascist professor father is dismissed, Yukie navigates love, political repression, and wartime upheaval—ultimately forging her own path in pre- and post-WWII Japan.
Love is a business at Family Romance, a company that rents human stand-ins for any occasion. Founder Yuichi Ishii helps make his clients’ dreams come true. But when the mother of 12-year-old Mahiro hires Ishii to impersonate her missing father, the line between acting and reality threatens to blur.
Sayuri Yoshinaga
Tetsu Ezure
Masato Sakai
Shujiro Ezure
Ryoko Shinohara
Mari Ezure
Hiroshi Abe
Tokujiro Ezure
Koichi Sato
Shinji Sugawara
Ittoku Kishibe
Kazuo Yamaoka
Masatoshi Nakamura
Daikichi Okabe
Reiko Takashima
Mitsue Shimada
Tsurube Shofukutei
bar owner
Toshiyuki Nagashima
Doctor Mita
Ken Yasuda
Hisashi Sugimoto
Toru Nomaguchi
Manabu Kimura