From Spike Lee comes this vibrant semi-autobiographical portrait of a school-teacher, her stubborn jazz-musician husband and their five kids living in '70s Brooklyn.
County Durham, England, 1984. The miners' strike has started and the police have started coming up from Bethnal Green, starting a class war with the lower classes suffering. Caught in the middle of the conflict is 11-year old Billy Elliot, who, after leaving his boxing club for the day, stumbles upon a ballet class and finds out that he's naturally talented. He practices with his teacher Mrs. Wilkinson for an upcoming audition in Newcastle-upon Tyne for the royal Ballet school in London.
During the British Raj, the orphan of a British soldier poses as a Hindu and is torn between his loyalty to a Buddhist mystic and aiding the English secret service.
In seaside Italy, a Holocaust survivor with a daycare business takes in a 12-year-old street kid who recently robbed her.
An abandoned child steals to survive and has problems when he decides to steal from the priest who helps him.
Young men with no future have little in the present as well. Natale is released from prison: he takes up with his friends again but none can find work. Claudio, from Palermo, gets out of juvenile detention in Naples and he's met by Vita, a girl who's come from home to run away with him. Where can they go? A young dad, whose potato stall at the market is shut down because he has no permit, takes his two small children to the beach and yells at them. Mario, gay, a prostitute in drag, gets a visit from his mom; he offers tea, then finds the water to his apartment is shut off. Social workers drop by, parole officers file reports. What hope is there? What options besides crime?
Documentary depicts what happened in Rio de Janeiro on June 12th 2000, when bus 174 was taken by an armed young man, threatening to shoot all the passengers. Transmitted live on all Brazilian TV networks, this shocking and tragic-ending event became one of violence's most shocking portraits, and one of the scariest examples of police incompetence and abuse in recent years.
A well-bred young English lad living in lower Manhattan tries to gain acceptance from his not-so-well-bred peers at school.
For the summer, troublemaker Freddie Egan is being sent to a camp-style juvenile detention center, while spoiled rich-kid Frederick Egan III is going to a luxurious getaway for kids of the elite. Until a name mix-up at the bus-boarding area sends the boys to each other's destinations, and while Eddie gets a taste of the good life, Frederick has to deal with being without all his usual comforts. Eventually, they both learn some valuable life-lessons.
A searing legal drama that centers on a highly credentialed child psychologist whose life is shattered when he's accused of sexually assaulting a young boy he's been treating.
Nick Romano lives in a poor tenement building on the south side of Chicago with his well-meaning but drug-addicted mother, Nellie. She encourages him to pursue his piano-playing talent in hopes that it will bring him a better life. Nellie's neighbors, like the alcoholic ex-lawyer who secretly loves her, help her in keeping Nick away from Louie, the resident drug dealer. But a chance meeting between Nick and Louie could change things forever.
An aimless adolescent joins several itinerant misfits who live on the fringe of society and welcome at-risk youths into their fold.
Rachid is a young man who survives in Morroco boxing in clandestine fights in order to save enough money with which to pay a smuggler, and be able to cross the Strait of Gibraltar with his two friends.
Karesz has been raised in an institution, his mother has a new family, and her husband does not tolerate that she meets her first-born son. Karesz tramps, joining up with his casual pals he washes the windscreens of cars, sells newspapers; sometimes they steal, or break into houses if hired.
A love story of a 17 year old punk-rocker and a 15 year old runaway girl.
A case of juvenile violence called "Horrible Tortures" shocks the city. The highest sentencing is life in prison. However, one of the most important criminal in the case, Beep, is only sentenced to seven-year imprisonment. The verdict has the other story behind.
Ali, Kwita, Omar and Boubker are street kids. The daily dose of glue sniffing represents their only escape from reality. Since they left Dib and his gang, they have been living on the portside of Casablanca. They live in constant fear of Dib's revenge. Ali wants to become a sailor - when he was living with his mother, a prostitute, he used to listen to a fairy tale about the sailor who discovered the miracle island with two suns. Instead of finding his island in the dream, Ali and his friends are confronted with Dib's gang. Matters are getting serious.
Cocky young street kid worships his father, a sleazy political operative.
According to the story, the heroes of the backyard are "Impression from the moment when a child realizes that childhood is transient". The scriptwriters combined episodes in the film on Merima's two works and placed events in an unspecified town after the wars. Costumes and sculptures refer to the wooden houses of the 1940s and 1950s. The venues included Suomenlinna and the Ruiskumestari House in Helsinki Kruununhaa. The backyard heroes were filmed for 16mm film originally as a television movie , but also taken to theatrical release.
