It’s MFA grad Palace Bryant’s final 24 hours in art school, and she is not going to the graduation party! She needs to get back home to Chicago from Upstate New York, but that means surviving a hazy, hilarious, and hallucinatory odyssey, stumbling from academic critiques to backseat hookups.

Public Enemy’s Chuck D leads a cast of hip-hop icons and leading African-American and Latino cultural commentators as they chart the factors that led to the birth of the revolutionary art form of hip-hop in 1970s New York, as well as the creation of the seminal hit The Message.

They evoke a picture of how, after the turbulence of the 60s and the civil rights struggles, desperate social conditions and the experience of countless dispossessed people of colour living in a city mired in crisis helped give birth to a new art form.

A Chance in the World is the unbelievable real life story of Steve, a wounded and broken boy destined to become a man of resilience and vision. From the day he is five-years-old and dropped off at his foster home of the next eleven years, Steve is mentally and physically tortured by Betty (his foster mother), Willie (her husband) and his foster siblings. Desperate for a sense of family and belonging, Steve searches for his biological parents, but no one in the system can help him. No one can tell him why, with obvious African-American features, he has the last name of Klakowicz.

Aibileen Clark is a middle-aged African-American maid who has spent her life raising white children and has recently lost her only son; Minny Jackson is an African-American maid who has often offended her employers despite her family’s struggles with money and her desperate need for jobs; and Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan is a young white woman who has recently moved back home after graduating college to find out her childhood maid has mysteriously disappeared. These three stories intertwine to explain how life in Jackson, Mississippi revolves around “the help”; yet they are always kept at a certain distance because of racial lines.

An African immigrant living illegally in Belgium is desperate to find his own sense of belonging.