Der Paukenspieler

The film tells different stories in a kind of parallel Germany about love, affection and hatred.

A psychotherapist helps a law student cope with schizophrenia in one of five interconnected tales dealing with mental illness.

Defiant young activists take the women's suffrage movement by storm, putting their lives at risk to help American women win the right to vote.

In a suburban landscape, the lives of several families interlace with loss, despair and personal crisis. Esther Gold has lost focus on all but caring for her comatose son, Paul, and neglects her daughter and husband. Lawyer Jim Train is devoted to his career, not his family. Helen Christianson wants to find a new spark in life, while Annette Jennings tries to rebuild hers.

A pair of twin brothers from East L.A. choose to live their lives differently and end up on opposite sides of the law.

Thomas Montgomery, a married father of two young daughters, gets seduced by the world of online gambling and chat rooms where a virtual romance and sexual obsession ultimately leads to the murder of an innocent man.

During the 1976 Soweto uprising, a white school teacher's life and values are threatened when he asks questions about the death of a young black boy who died in police custody.

A young man with a bright future suffers a near-fatal accident and recreates his new life with the help of an unlikely animal friend.

When seventeen-year-old Hannah stumbles upon a website about Thinspiration--an online community devoted to anorexia as a life choice--she becomes an obsessive follower of the site founder, ButterflyAna. By the time Hannah's family realizes what is happening and get Hannah the help she needs, the disease has fully taken hold and Hannah is refusing to eat. Will this family be able to exorcise the demon of anorexia from their lives?

Back from a tour of duty, Kelli struggles to find her place in her family and the rust-belt town she no longer recognizes.