A drama-documentary film about the fatal effect of poor living conditions on health – the so-called "social inheritance." The principal characters in the film are two fourteen or fifteen-year-old children, Carl and Hanne. Covering a hundred-year period and drawing on case stories recorded by actual hospital staff, the film illustrates a number of variations of "the same old story."
A young boy, Alfred, is dying, but through the stories about Helium, a magical fantasy world, told by the hospital's eccentric janitor, Enzo, Alfred regains the joy and happiness of his life, and finds a safe haven away from daily life.
Erik, a loner, finds a friend in Dexter, an eleven-year-old boy with AIDS. They vow to find a cure for AIDS together and save Dexter's life in an eventful summer.
Klaus works voluntary as a Santa Claus in a shopping mall. After an exhausting day, he considers to hang up his job. But then, he gets a call from the children's intensive care unit.
The daughter of a lighthouse keeper falls ill with diphtheria, but there is no doctor on the island. A wireless operator has the idea of contacting a passing passenger liner, to try and find a doctor.
A couple of teenagers have a son who suffers from progeria, a rare genetic disorder which makes one age exponentially faster than normal. 16 years later, the child has the body of an 80 year old in the final days of his life writing a book about his parents' love story.
Vera, a mom in the 1930s, mourns the loss of her baseball player husband and her 7-year-old daughter. After finding relics from her daughter’s life in a room, she unexpectedly experiences the time in which her loved ones were alive. In this dream-like world opened through her memory, she reconnects with her daughter and husband and comes to terms with her collapsed world.
A blackout leaves those affected to consider what is necessary, what is legal, and what is questionable, in order to survive in a predatory environment.
Fictionalized account of how Clement C. Moore came to write "A Visit from St. Nicholas." His young daughter, stricken with pneumonia, asks for a Santa Claus story for Christmas. No such story had been written, so Moore writes his famous poem, set to Ken Darby's music and sung by The Norman Luboff Choir.
“Laura” is based on a true story about a dramatic search and rescue mission at Halemba coal mine that gripped Poland in February of 2006. A miner was trapped underground, and by the fourth day when everyone was beginning to lose hope of his safe return, the rescue team heard a faint knocking on the pipeline. After a nearly a week long search, the miner was rescued. Those who followed the story closely called it a miracle. But the miner claimed that what saved him was stronger than a miracle – his love for his daughter Laura, and his wife Marlena.
Members of a teenage gang are sent to the State Reformatory, presided over by the callous Thompson. Soon Patsy Gargan, a former gangster appointed Deputy Commissioner, arrives and takes over the administration to run the place on radical principles. Thompson needs a quick way to discredit him.
Born with their immune systems damaged, Tom and Lola are doomed to live their lives in isolation, sealed in separate plastic bubbles. However, neither cold urethane nor chillier hospital technicians can keep down the beguiling spirit of these indomitable siblings.
In Louisville, Kentucky, hairdresser Sharon Stevens rallies the masses to help widowed father Ed Schmitt save his critically ill 5 year old daughter Michelle after their community is hit by a major snowstorm from the 1994 North American cold wave.
Dane Jensen is a driven, Chicago-based headhunter, working at a cut-throat job placement firm. When his boss pits Dane against Lynn Vogel, Dane's equally driven but polar-opposite rival at the firm, in a battle for control over the company. When his young son is then given a harrowing diagnosis, Dane is suddenly pulled between achieving his professional dream and spending time with the family that needs him now more than ever.
Lolly has always searched for her father who abandoned her and her sister DeDe, believing that finding him will right all wrongs. Her quest leads her into an adult world, which it seems, is no place for a child. The answers Lolly seeks are secreted in the unspoken past. As the doors close on her efforts, Lolly is faced with the harshest of realities. Nobody’s Child is a coming of age story about a young girl searching for her identity.
After Ingeborg Holm's husband becomes sick and dies, the family's small grocery store fails, Ingeborg becomes bankrupt, and she is forced to move to the workhouse. Her three children go to foster homes. Ingeborg simply must see them again.
Eleven-year-old Guillaume suffers from a serious and potentially fatal heart condition. Gradually, the young boy's family fractures under the weight of his illness.