Off Beat

Lukas, a young schizophrenic man, has to deal with a new town, a new relationship, and the paranoia in his head.

After a chance encounter with a wanted man, a woman is harassed by the police and press until she takes violent action.

A poor young Belgian mother wants her petty thief of a boyfriend to be gainfully employed to raise their newborn child, but he has other ideas.

Faced with an unplanned pregnancy, sixteen year old high-schooler, Juno MacGuff, makes an unusual decision regarding her unborn child.

Novalee Nation is a 17-year-old Tennessee transient who has to grow up in a hurry when she's left pregnant and abandoned by her boyfriend on a roadside, and takes refuge in the friendly aisles of Wal-Mart. Eventually, some eccentric but kindly strangers 'adopt' Novalee and her infant daughter, helping them buck the odds and build a new life.

Stephanie collapses in a pool of blood while on a school skiing trip. A doctor discovers that the blood is the after-effects of giving birth. Soon afterward, the body of a newborn baby is found in a toilet, its mouth blocked with toilet paper. Despite Stephanie's insistence that her child was stillborn and that she had no idea that she was pregnant, she is arrested for the murder of the child.

Once called "Father Frank" for his efforts to rescue lives, Frank Pierce sees the ghosts of those he failed to save around every turn. He has tried everything he can to get fired, calling in sick, delaying taking calls where he might have to face one more victim he couldn't help, yet cannot quit the job on his own.

Based on Tommy Jaud's bestselling novel, this comedy focuses on a dispassionate clerk and his set-backs in life. 29-year-old Simon works in a phone shop, but his thoughts just circle around finding a new girl-friend after being left by his last one year ago. While his Croatian cleaner tries to procure him, his efforts to chat up women in clubs also fail. However, he finds the woman of his dreams (and mother of their future children) in his most hated coffee shop, although not having a clue how to win her heart...

Yoon-young, a 19-year-old girl who dreams of becoming a civil servant, is framed as a murderer and imprisoned in a women's prison.

In Hamburg, Ibrahim "Ibo" Secmez, of Turkish descent, wants to direct the first German kung-fu movie. For now, he makes commercials for his uncle's kebab restaurant. Titzie, an aspiring actress and Ibo's German girlfriend, finds she's pregnant. Ibo is uncertain about fatherhood - compounded by his father's disowning him for getting a German girl pregnant - so Titzie sends him packing. He makes attempts at getting it right, but as the birth approaches, he's still not ready. In the background are three thugs in search of good tripe soup and a Capulet-Montegue feud between the kebab joint and a Greek taverna across the street. Can Ibo be the glove upon that hand?

Sarah is a French astronaut training at the European Space Agency in Cologne. She is the only woman in the arduous program. She lives alone with Stella, her seven year old daughter. Sarah feels guilty that she cannot spend more time with her child. Her love is overpowering, unsettling. When Sarah is chosen to join the crew of a year-long space mission called Proxima, it creates chaos in the mother-daughter relationship.

In a staid English seaside town after the Second World War, young Lynda grows up with her widowed father and younger sister. Rebellious Lynda has been swearing constantly from an early age. At sixteen, she becomes more exhibitionist and seeks out sexual encounters challenging the prevailing lower-middle class attitudes to sex.

The heterosexual man Axel is thrown out of his girlfriends home for cheating and ends up moving in with a gay man. Axel learns the advantages of living with gay men even though they are attracted to him and when his girlfriend wants him back he must make a tough decision.

The unborn child of Mamlakat is telling her story. She is 17, beautiful and vivacious, and dreaming secretly of becoming an actress. She lives with her father and brother in a small village in Central Asia. One night she is seduced by an actor from a travelling troupe, who poses as a friend of Tom Cruise, and gets her pregnant. She tries to abort, but her father and brother become determined to find the seducer, setting in motion a cascade of comic adventures.

Detached filmmaker Anna Silver arrives in Germany to show her latest film; over the course of some days, she encounters a variety of new and old faces, some of whom make personal revelations to her to little affect.