A young writer brings a collection of short stories to a big Moscow publishing house. The manuscript stays at the office and mysteriously influences the lives of anyone who opens it and reads at least one page. There are four stories in the manuscript, and four readers whose lives are changed after reading them. The situations range from realistic to absurd to thrilling to create a rich portrait of life in contemporary Russia and showcase the thoughts, feelings and ambitions of people who live there.

When a border guard with a sixth sense for identifying smugglers encounters the first person she cannot prove is guilty, she is forced to confront terrifying revelations about herself and humankind.

Olavi, an aged and shabby art dealer, is planning to retire. Accidentally he finds an old painting that he suspects being much more valuable than his colleagues have priced it. He decides to try to prove for the last time for himself, his colleagues and his estranged family that he can make it.

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.

Over the course of a week, sisters Inger and Ellen find their relationship challenged on a highly anticipated coach trip to Paris. Inger reveals her struggles with schizophrenia to the group, receiving both pity and discrimination. On arrival, it soon becomes clear that Inger has a hidden agenda concerning a figure from her past, ultimately involving the entire group in her hunt for answers.

Townsend Harris is sent by President Pierce to Japan to serve as the first U.S. Consul-General to that country. Harris discovers enormous hostility to foreigners, as well as the love of a young geisha.

A deadly mistake sets an introspective henchman on a violent crusade against a mid-level crime boss with demons of his own. (IMDB)

As one of the youngest Planned Parenthood clinic directors in the nation, Abby Johnson was involved in upwards of 22,000 abortions and counseled countless women on their reproductive choices. Her passion surrounding a woman’s right to choose led her to become a spokesperson for Planned Parenthood, fighting to enact legislation for the cause she so deeply believed in. Until the day she saw something that changed everything.

New York City teenager Jo (Ana Villafañe) witnesses the gruesome murder of both her parents and is sent to rural Montana as part of the Witness Protection Program. On top of having no cell phone, email or any contact with her past life, plus hiding from a dangerous hitman out to finish her off, Jo must also deal with the drama of being the new kid in the small town’s high school (www.tribute.ca).

A nobleman with a literary flair, the Marquis de Sade lives in a madhouse where a beautiful laundry maid smuggles his erotic stories to a printer, defying orders from the asylum’s resident priest. The titillating passages whip all of France into a sexual frenzy, until a fiercely conservative doctor tries to put an end to the fun.

Born free in the American West, Black Beauty is a horse rounded up and brought to Birtwick Stables, where she meets spirited teenager Jo Green. The two forge a bond that carries Beauty through the different chapters, challenges and adventures.

A family saga in which three of a Bavarian widow’s sons go to war for Germany and the fourth goes to America, Germany’s eventual opponent. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with L’Imaginne Ritrovato and Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation in 1999.