Everything is terrible and I need to cry

Uxbal, single father of two children, finds his life in chaos as he is forced to deal with his life in order to escape the heat of crime in underground Barcelona, to break with the love for the divorced, manic depressive, abusive mother of his children and to regain spiritual insight in his life as he is diagnosed with terminal cancer.

After a chance encounter at a theater, two men, Benigno and Marco, meet at a private clinic where Benigno works. Lydia, Marco's girlfriend and a bullfighter by profession, has been gored and is in a coma. It so happens that Benigno is looking after another woman in a coma, Alicia, a young ballet student. The lives of the four characters will flow in all directions, past, present and future, dragging all of them towards an unsuspected destiny.

Otto and Ana are kids when they meet each other. Their names are palindromes. They meet by chance, people are related by chance. A story of circular lives, with circular names, and a circular place (Círculo polar) where the day never ends in the midnight sun. There are things that never end, and Love is one of them.

Soon after moving in, Beth, a brainy, beautiful writer damaged from a past relationship encounters Adam, the handsome, but odd, fellow in the downstairs apartment whose awkwardness is perplexing. Beth and Adam's ultimate connection leads to a tricky relationship that exemplifies something universal: truly reaching another person means bravely stretching into uncomfortable territory and the resulting shake-up can be liberating.

David Kepesh is growing old. He's a professor of literature, a student of American hedonism, and an amateur musician and photographer. When he finds a student attractive, Consuela, a 24-year-old Cuban, he sets out to seduce her. Along the way, he swims in deeper feelings, maybe he's drowning. She presses him to sort out what he wants from her, and a relationship develops. They talk of traveling. He confides in his friend, George, a poet long-married, who advises David to grow up and grow old. She invites him to meet her family. His own son, from a long-ended marriage, confronts him. Is the elegy for lost relationships, lost possibilities, beauty and time passing, or failure of nerve?

Ann's boyfriend calls her from Prague. Twenty-five days after leaving her at the airport, he confesses he does not love her any more and that he is with another girl. Ann calls a telephone line for desperate people, finding Don at the other end of the line, a guy who seems unable to understand her problems. They meet by chance...

In a time of crisis, a young boy tries to make sense of the fine line between fantasy and reality in this drama from Spain. Nicolas (Ricardo Darin) is a toy designer who has married Ingrid (Irene Jacob), a scientist studying birds who has been raising her son Raul (Victor Valdivia) on her own since her husband was killed while serving in Iraq. Nicolas and Raul develop a close bond, and when the boy asks his new step-father about why his dad died, he tells the youngster stories about the fairies that be believed guided the world when he was a boy. Nicolas also shows Raul the shack he built in the woods where he used to go when he was troubled as a kid. While Nicolas's relationship with Ingrid falls apart, he remains close to Raul. One night, Nicolas befriends Sezar (Bebe), a clerk at a grocery store who is beaten when her unscrupulous boss is attacked by a gang of toughs while driving her home. With nowhere else for her to stay, Nicolas takes Sezar back to his shack so she can get a good night's sleep and clear her mind after the trauma. However, when Raul happens by the shack the next morning, he doesn't know what to make of its new occupant until he decides Sezar is one of the fairies Nicolas once believed in.

Passion, obsession, wealth, jealousy, family, guilt, and creativity. In Madrid, Harry Caine is a blind screenwriter, assisted by Judit and her son Diego. The past comes rushing in when Harry learns of the death of Ernesto Martel, a wealthy businessman, and Ernesto's son pays Harry a visit. In a series of flashbacks to the 1990s, we see Harry, who was then Mateo Blanco, a director; he falls in love with Ernesto's mistress, Lena, and casts her in a film, which Ernesto finances. Ernesto is jealous and obsessive, sending his son to film the making of the movie, to follow Lena and Mateo, and to give him the daily footage. Judit doesn't like Lena. It's a collision course.

In a small coastal town of fishermen in Uruguay, the biologist Kraken works and lives in a house at the sea side with his wife Suli and their aggressive fifteen year-old daughter Alex. When Suli welcomes her former best friend Erika that comes with her husband, the surgeon Ramiro and their teenage son Alvaro from Argentina to spend a couple of days with her family, Kraken learns of the real reason for their visit, for Ramiro to operate on Alex. The reason being that Alex was born with both male and female sex organs. During the visit Alex and Alvaro grow closer in attraction to one another and eventually have sexual intercourse which causes even more confusion for the both of them. This film follows this period of time in Alex's life as she deals with constant questions about her gender identification, a pursuit of love and how to cope with her uniqueness.

Almost forty years ago, a young girl of fourteen has sex, gets pregnant, and gives her baby up for adoption. Fast-forwarding to the present day, we meet three very different women, each of whom struggles to maintain control of their lives. There's Elizabeth, a smart and successful lawyer who uses her body to her advantage. Any time she feels that she doesn't have the upper hand, and cannot control the situation, she uses her sex appeal - whether that be starting a romance with her boss when she suspects he is trying to start one himself, or finding some way to control her overly friendly neighbor and husband. Karen, meanwhile, is a bitter health care professional who obviously has a lot of heart but never shows it. She gave up a daughter at the age of fourteen (wonderfully shown rather than told, she is the young girl and mother of Elizabeth), and has never gotten over it - her bitterness inspiring her to lash out at everyone around her - even the gentle man at work who is undeniably drawn to her. Finally, Lucy is a woman who has failed to conceive with her husband, so she turns to adoption to make the family she desires.

Paris, je t'aime is about the plurality of cinema in one mythic location: Paris, the City of Love. Twenty filmmakers have five minutes each; the audience must weave a single narrative out of twenty moments. The 20 moments are fused by transitional interstitial sequences and also via the introduction and epilogue. Each transition begins with the last shot of the previous film and ends with the first shot of the following film, extending the enchantment and the emotion of the previous segment, preparing the audience for a surprise, and providing a cohesive atmosphere. There's a reappearing mysterious character who is a witness to the Parisian life. A common theme of Paris and love fuses all.

Oliveiro is a young poet living in Buenos Aires where sometimes he has to sell his ideas to an advertising agency to make a living or exchange his poems for a steak. In Montevideo, he meets a prostitute, Ana, with whom he falls in love. Back in Buenos Aires, he accepts a contract with a publicity agency to get the money for three days of love with her. Will he get what he's searching for when his ideal of love's pleasure is literally going in levitation while making love?

Kym Buchman has been in drug rehab for nine months, during which time she has been clean. She is released temporarily from the facility to attend her sister Rachel Buchman's wedding. During her release, Kym is staying at the family home, where the wedding is taking place. As such, it is like Grand Central Station for the duration of Kym's stay, which may not be the most conducive situation for her in constantly being exposed to the watching eyes of those who know and don't yet know her, but know of her situation. The reunion with her family members starts off well enough, but issues around Kym's release from rehab quickly surface. Kym and Rachel's father, Paul Buchman, wants to make sure that Kym is all right at all times, which to Kym feels instead like he doesn't trust her. Rachel slowly begins to resent Kym's situation taking over what is supposed to be the happiest day of her life, some of which is directed by Kym, some of which isn't. One person present but largely not included in the last minute wedding planning work is Kym and Rachel's mother, Abby, from who Paul is divorced. The two have since married other people. Outwardly, Abby has been nurturing of Kym throughout her life. However, what is one of the key moments in Kym's drug induced life, and in their collective family's lives, may profoundly affect the wedding. Beyond how Kym's presence affects the wedding, the goings-on of the family during Kym's short stay may either bring them closer together or tear them apart.

A love story about people separated by time and place but connected in profound and mysterious ways. Atmospheric, fantastical, tragic and hopeful, the film chronicles the parallel fates of Jacqueline, a young mother with a disabled son in 1960s Paris, and Antoine, a recently divorced, successful DJ in present day Montreal. What binds the two stories together is love - euphoric, obsessive, tragic, youthful, timeless love. In 1960s Paris, a working class woman gives birth to her first child, Laurent - a Down Syndrome son. Undaunted she embraces the challenge of raising her beloved offspring as normally as one would any other child. Her husband abandons them both. She bravely brushes this additional hiccup aside as Laurent replaces her spouse as the perfect man of her dreams. As Laurent approaches school age Jacqueline's aplomb becomes obsessive and cloying. Her increasingly self-destructive attachment to her son is raised to a fever pitch when, at the age of seven, he meets a Down Syndrome girl (Véronique) and experiences his first crush. His sudden desire for independence, and his attraction to Véra, are the catalysts that transform Jacqueline from a loving mother into something resembling a lover scorned. What emerges is a love triangle of potentially tragic proportions. In 21st century Montreal, a forty year old divorcée, Carole, is trying to restart her life after her divorce, two years earlier, from Antoine, a devastatingly handsome, successful touring DJ. Soul mates who've been a couple since the age of fifteen, their divorce is a schism that might prove impossible for either of them to put in the past. Making the transition even more difficult for Carole is the fact that her two daughters, one teen, one tween, are about to gain a stepmother, a stunningly beautiful, heartbreaking blonde, a woman about to "steal" away the perfect man of her dreams. The young girls are being cruelly pulled in two different directions, Antoine's father, a recovering alcoholic, seems to side with his ex-daughter-in-law, and Carole is succumbing to fits of depression and potentially dangerous bouts of sleepwalking. What emerges is a love triangle of potentially tragic proportions.

A traumatic love, on which Rimini (Gael García Bernal) fails to discard. Twelve years have passed since his marriage to Sofia and the breakup seems, at least, consensual. After the separation, Rimini will have erratic attempts to rebuild his love life. Each of the women who will appear on his path will be forced to stay away from him.

Argentine Manuela Echevarria, an organ transplant coordinator at a Madrid hospital, ran off from her husband in Barcelona eighteen years ago upon learning that she was pregnant, their son, Esteban, who she has never told about his father despite his curiosity, and her husband who didn't know about the pregnancy when she ran off. An event coinciding with Esteban, an aspiring writer, turning seventeen leads to Manuela feeling the need to return to Barcelona to look for her husband. There, she ends up further acting as the maternal figure for people in need. One is a young nun named Sister Rosa, who she meets through her old friend, a transvestite prostitute who has assumed the name Agrado in her agreeable nature. Rosa has a strained relationship with her own conservative mother, as she is consumed with caring for her ill husband, who suffers from Alzheimer's. The other is actress Huma Rojo, currently appearing as Blanche Dubois in a stage production of A Streetcar Named Desire, which has long been a touchstone for Manuela in productions of it coinciding with milestone moments in her life, this production no different. Huma is in a troubled codependent relationship with her younger "Stella Kowalski" costar Nina Cruz, a closet junkie, hence Huma's emotional need for support. By the end of her stay in Barcelona, Manuela will have another non-relative for who she will feel the need to act as a mother figure.

Elizabeth's heart is broken. For solace, she drops in late at night a few times at Jeremy's diner for blueberry pie a la mode; they talk. Once, he watchers her sleep, her head on the counter. Abruptly, she leaves New York City to get away from her pain. She works a couple of jobs in Memphis. There, a heart-broken cop is drinking himself into oblivion, his ex occasionally showing up where he drinks and Lizzy works. Then, she's in Nevada, working at a casino where she uses her savings (she wants a car) to stake Leslie, a busted gambler, in a high rollers' game. After, Beth drives Leslie to Vegas where Leslie's estranged father lives. Broken relationships. What about Jeremy?

Echoes of "Madame Bovary" in the American suburbs. Sarah's in a loveless marriage to an advertising executive, long days with her young daughter at the park and the pool, wanting more. Brad is an immature househusband, married to a flinty documentary filmmaker. Ronnie is just out of prison - two years for indecent exposure to a minor - living with his elderly mother, May; Larry is a retired cop, fixated on driving Ronnie away. Sarah and Brad connect, a respite of adult companionship at the pool. Ronnie and Larry have their demons. Brad should be studying for the bar; Larry misses his job; Ronnie's mom thinks he needs a girlfriend. Sarah longs to refuse to be trapped in an unhappy life. Where can these tangled paths lead?