Based on the true story of Henri Charriere, also known as Papillon, which is French for ‘butterfly’ (the character even sports a large tattoo of a butterfly. A petty criminal, Papillon is wrongly convicted of murder and sentenced to life in a French penal colony in ‘Guiane’ (French Guiana, South America). Papillon is determined to escape but attempt after attempt meets with difficulty, resulting in eventual recapture. He continues his attempts to escape despite incarcerations in solitary confinement as punishment.

Richard and Susan are a couple from San Diego, California who are vacationing in Morocco while their two children are at home with their Mexican housekeeper, Amelia. A rifle finds its way into the hands of a local herdsman’s young sons, who recklessly take a shot at a tour bus and hit Susan in the shoulder, causing her severe injury. The distraught Richard calls home to tell Amelia of the situation, who shortly departs for Mexico to attend her son’s wedding, with Richard and Susan’s children in tow. Disaster thus multiplies, with the situation in Morocco ascribed to terrorists in the media, while Amelia meets with trouble at the Mexican border when she attempts to return to San Diego with Richard and Susan’s children. Meanwhile, in Tokyo, a widower tied to the rifle in question, a complex shift of ownership to which the audience is privy, attempts to deal with the memories of his recently deceased wife and his strained relationship with his deaf teenage daughter.

Two directionless musicans, a Chicano guitarist (Cheech Marin) and a White drummer (Tommy Chong), meet up in a chance encounter and embark on a series of odd adventures, including being the unwitting partcipants of a bizarre marijuana smuggling plot.

Maya is a quick-witted young woman who comes over the Mexican border without papers and makes her way to the LA home of her older sister Rosa. Rosa gets Maya a job as a janitor: a non-union janitorial service has the contract, the foul-mouthed supervisor can fire workers on a whim, and the service-workers’ union has assigned organizer Sam Shapiro to bring its “justice for janitors” campaign to the building. Sam finds Maya a willing listener, she’s also attracted to him. Rosa resists, she has an ailing husband to consider. The workers try for public support; management intimidates workers to divide and conquer. Rosa and Maya as well as workers and management may be set to collide.

The true story of Wladyslaw Szpilman who, in the 1930s, was known as the most accomplished piano player in all of Poland, if not Europe. At the outbreak of the Second World War, however, Szpilman becomes subject to the anti-Jewish laws imposed by the conquering Germans. By the start of the 1940s, Szpilman has seen his world go from piano concert halls to the Jewish Ghetto of Warsaw and then must suffer the tragedy of his family deported to a death camp, while Szpilman is conscripted into a forced German Labor Compound. At last deciding to escape, Szpilman goes into hiding as a Jewish refugee where he is witness to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943 and the Warsaw City Revolt in August/October 1944.