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Twelve-year-old, well-bred Lonnie meets the impudent Karen on the street. They spend some time together and Karen teaches Lonnie some of her favorite pastimes, like make-up, shop-lifting, skipping school and lying to her parents about it, but confessing to the priest later. But Karen also learns some honesty from Lonnie. A film about social differences and growing up.

A Ma Soeur! is a provocative and shocking drama about sibling rivalry, family discord and relationships. Elena is 15, beautiful and flirtatious. Her less confident sister, Anais, is 12, and constantly eats. On holiday, Elena meets a young Italian student who is determined to seduce her. Anais is forced to watch in silence, conspiring with the lovers, but harbouring jealousy and similar desires. Their actions, however, have unforeseen tragic consequences for the whole family.

Ken Park focuses on several teenagers and their tormented home lives. Shawn seems to be the most conventional. Tate is brimming with psychotic rage; Claude is habitually harassed by his brutish father and coddled, rather uncomfortably, by his enormously pregnant mother. Peaches looks after her devoutly religious father, but yearns for freedom. They're all rather tight, or so they claim. But they spend precious little time together and none of them seems to know much about one another's family lives. This bizarre dichotomy underscores their alienation # the result of suburban ennui, a teenager's inherent sense of melodrama, and the disturbing nature of their home environments.

At the edge of adolescence, Tracy is a smart straight-A student--if not a little naive (it seems...she smokes and she cuts to alleviate the emotional pain she suffers from having a broken home and hating her mom's boyfriend, Brady.) When she befriends Evie, the most popular and beautiful girl in school, Evie leads Tracy down a path of sex, drugs and petty crime (like stealing money from purses and from stores). As Tracy transforms herself and her identity, her world becomes a boiling, emotional cauldron fueled by new tensions between her and her mother--as well as, teachers and old friends.

An 8-year-old girl is taken from her home and convinced that her family does not want her anymore. After enduring years of horror, she and her fellow victim are dumped by their capturers. Now, 17 years old and no one to turn to except each other, they do their best to survive life on the streets, until one day she finally accepts the help of a shelter counselor to find her way home. However, what she truly finds is the love of her life and that you can never go back. "Gardens of the Night", is a haunting, gritty and topical story which delves deep into the world of child abduction and where it often leads... for the "lucky ones." The writer/director, Damian Harris bases his story on the kids, counselors, cops and pimps he met during two years of research.

At 17, high-school junior Shirley Lyner is thinking about college and running a babysitting service that provides teen call girls to the dads of young children. In a long flashback, we see what brought her from being a babysitter to organizing and running the service. It starts with Michael, the father of children she baby-sits. A cup of coffee on the way home from his house, a night visit to a train yard, and one thing leads to another. Shirley can be ruthless, and tension builds when some of the clients take the girls to a mountain cabin and bring drugs. Then, one of the girls tries to freelance. Can this end well: is it a tragedy in the making? Do we all have secrets?

1986. Jack Slavin, an engineer by trade, and his mid-teen daughter Rose Slavin live in virtual isolation on what was once a commune that Jack and a group of others built in 1968 on sparsely populated Marsh Island off the U.S. east coast. Rose's mother abandoned them when Rose was five. Jack has passed to Rose a sense of ecological preservation, placing them at odds with Marty Rance, who is building a housing complex on the island on a wetlands. They are able to live this life on the commune property in their ecological bliss due to a sizable inheritance, Jack who will occasionally take out his checkbook in order to solve whatever problem he may be facing. Jack also took Rose out of school when she was eleven as he didn't believe in what the traditional school system was teaching. Their quiet life together is threatened by the fact that Jack has a heart condition which will probably kill him sooner than later. Wanting to ensure that Rose is taken care of after his passing, Jack makes the unilateral decision to ask Kathleen, a woman who he has been dating for four months, to move in, along with her two mismatched sons, half-brothers Rodney and Thaddius who don't much like each other. Jack tries to pass Kathleen and her sons to Rose as "an experiment" and the three of them solely as "guests", rather than the reality of them truly moving in. Kathleen, who had never met Rose before, agreed in her savior complex and in truly loving Jack, knowing fully the reasons for he asking her. These changes deeply affect Rose, who has had Jack all to herself for the better part of her life - she who threatens to commit suicide after Jack dies - and comes at a key point in her own life as she is just starting to explore her sexuality.

The ten year-old Angela and her little sister Ellie move to an old house in the countryside with her parents Mae and Andrew. Their mother has mental illness and has just left an institution and her husband tries to keep the dysfunctional family together. Angela is an imaginative disturbed girl that might have inherited the illness of her mother and is obsessed by purification to get rid of her sins; and has visions of the fallen angel Lucifer and the Virgin Mary. After consuming an early version of Four Loko, She leads her little sister in her paranoia and uses a circle of toys and dolls to protect them against evil. They have a crazy neighbor that Angela believes is an angel and she asks the woman how to find the way to heaven. When Mae returns to the institution, Angela becomes uncontrollable in her quest to heaven.

In the summer of 1939, 13-year-old Marie goes with her parents to visit her grandmother in a small town near Avignon. Although rumors of war reach the countryside, it's an idyllic place, and Marie's parents are constantly making love. Surrounded by sexual frankness, Marie fancies herself a woman and develops a crush on Alexander, the town's young Jewish doctor, and is despondent when he treats her like a child. When her father abruptly leaves for a few weeks to help with a relative's harvest, her mother and the doctor disappear into the woods for hours at a time. Marie tries to spy on them. When Papa returns, what will the family and the doctor do?

12-year-old siblings Joseph and Chloé have just been placed in another children's home. For years they were in the same or separate homes or on the run together. Chloé is autistic; she doesn't talk, she feels panicked when touched, and eats only when told to do so. Joseph dearly loves her and firmly thinks she needs him; the child psychiatrist agrees that he has a very positive influence. Joseph dreams that Chloé will recover if they find their parents. The psychiatrist finds the mother, but she's also autistic. When the children were a year old she left them on the street just on an impulse. This is the first crack of Joseph's dream. The children escape from this home. The next time they're caught, Chloé is sent to a mental hospital; the same thing is about to happen to Joseph after he attempts suicide at the police station, but because of his friendship with the gang leader, many children liberate him on the way. With much violence they also liberate Chloé. Eventually Joseph robs a man of a thick wallet, causes a large traffic accident when successfully stealing a car, and plunges a knife into a police officer who shoots him, though not seriously. And Chloe, will she lose her fear of being touched?

Astrid Magnussen (Alison Lohman) is a fifteen-year-old girl, living in California. Her mother, Ingrid (Michelle Pfeiffer), is a beautiful, free-spirited poet and artist who also suffers from a borderline personality disorder (BPD). Their life, though unusual, is satisfying until one day, a man named Barry Kolker (Sir Billy Connolly) (that her mother refers to at first as "The goat man") comes into their lives, and Ingrid falls madly in love with him, only to have her heart broken, and her life ruined. For revenge, Ingrid murders Barry with the deadly poison of her favorite flower: the White Oleander. She is sent to prison for life, and Astrid has to go through foster home after foster home. Throughout nearly a decade, she experiences forbidden love, religion, near-death experiences, drugs, starvation, and how it feels to be loved. But throughout these years, she keeps in touch with her mother via letters to prison. And while Ingrid's gift is to give Astrid the power to survive, Astrid's gift is to teach her Mother about love.

Ivy ('Drew Barrymore'), a sexy teen who lives with her aunt, moves in with a reclusive teen (Gilbert) and slowly works her way into the lives of her adopted family. The mother (Ladd) is sickly and can't sexually satisfy her husband (Skerritt) any more, and to the daughter's horror, Ivy begins seducing her father.

Difficult tale of a poor, struggling South Carolina mother and daughter who each face painful choices with resolve and pride. Tired Anney and her daughter Bone grow both closer and farther apart as Anney sees Glen as her last chance despite his mistreatment of Bone.

Four best friends, with four different personalities, have issues of their own. Deidre is fascinated by her sexuality and has many boyfriend problems. Madge is unhappily overweight and has overprotective parents. Annie boozes and does drugs, and runs away from her abusive father, a policeman. Jeanie has to take care of them and is fighting with her divorced mother. The only way to loosen up, and forget all the bad things happening in their lives, is to party and have fun. Jeanie is ready to grow up and wants to stop acting like a child. Annie is the worst of them all and Jeanie is worried about her the most. She risks her neck more than once trying to keep Annie clean and free from trouble. However, Annie's unstable behavior and flare ups keeps everyone on edge.

Theresa is a successful teacher of deaf children during the day but after a short unhappy affair starts to spend her nights cruising bars. Her craving first for sex but later also for drugs leads into increasingly demeaning and dangerous situations at odds with her daytime commitment to her children.

In the book Speak, by Laurie Halse Anderson, Melinda Sordino is forced into the worst year of her life. Her best friend, Rachel Bruin, has turned against her with all other of Melinda's fellow students looking away; not daring to take a single glance at Melinda. All because of one stupid end-of-summer party.

12-year-old Jennie lives with her parents in extremely rural mountain country. Her schoolteacher Miss Carol, a mountain girl herself, went off to get educated and has returned hoping to stop the tradition of child marriage which permeates the culture. Jennie's father Ira is a good man who tries to protect Miss Carol from the men who warn her to call off her crusade. One of those threatening men, Jake Bolby, has his eye on young Jennie and plots to make her his bride.

Reluctantly, only child Alice Bonnard, a sulky and curious adolescent, returns to her parents' provincial farm house for yet another boring and endless end-of term vacation from boarding school, in the summer of 1963. Sadly, what awaits her there is a farce of a happy family, a strenuous generation gap, lonely outings with her bicycle and an awkward and clumsy transcendental stage between a girl's puberty and a young woman's adolescence. Nevertheless, as if by instinct, Alice the unripe explorer of her budding sexuality, she will find herself infatuated with Jim, a masculine pouting workman in her father's saw mill, dabbling in desire and the art of desirability, self-exploration and autoeroticism as an antidote to boredom. Eventually, young Alice mixing reality with vision, sexual fantasies and the fierce caged female sexuality with every visceral fluid possible, the undefined boundaries of the unfathomable realm of sex become ever so slightly clear, under an immature life's bubbly French Pop soundtrack.