Stella Craze

Stephanie Schultz

Cassandra has always defined her worth through her role as a mother, but when her newly-adult daughter, Florence, experiences a still birth they both must realize their own value as women, separate from motherhood.

Yashima is a woman who works as a plumber. She is also uncomfortable with her own sexuality. One day she visits a home for a job and meets Kyu. Yashima senses Kyu's eyes watching her. They become intimate, but a dark secret is soon revealed.

Summer is a carefree teenage girl whose world is turned upside down when her mother abruptly converts to Islam and becomes a different person. At first resistant to the faith, she begins to reevaluate her identity after becoming attracted to a Muslim classmate, crossing the thin line between physical desire and piety.

A Chinese-American lesbian and her traditionalist mother are reluctant to go public with secret loves that clash against cultural expectations.

Winter 1975 - author Jeanette Aspen arrives at Lapinlahti Mental Hospital to meet her only child, psychiatrist Karin Aspen, 36 years after sending her daughter to Sweden as herself traveled to Southern Europe, at the start of the Winter War. The encounter triggers a drama between the mother and daughter, who are now total strangers to each other.

Through a series of flashbacks, four Chinese women born in America and their respective mothers born in feudal China explore their pasts.

Or shoulders a lot: she's 17 or 18, a student, works evenings at a restaurant, recycles cans and bottles for cash, and tries to keep her mother Ruthie from returning to streetwalking in Tel Aviv. Ruthie calls Or "my treasure," but Ruthie is a burden. She's just out of hospital, weak, and Or has found her a job as a house cleaner. The call of the quick money on the street is tough for Ruthie to ignore. Or's emotions roil further when the mother of the youth she's in love with comes to the flat to warn her off. With love fading and Ruthie perhaps beyond help, Or's choices narrow.

Erika Kohut, a sexually repressed piano teacher living with her domineering mother, meets a young man who starts romantically pursuing her.

China, 1997. An unhappy marriage, a love affair and a child who holds all the secrets.