Ties That Bind

Feeling awkward and isolated, an imaginative and strong-willed teenage girl runs away from home with an older punk rock drifter.

Jamie Fitzpatrick and Nona Alberts are two women from opposites sides of the social and economic track, but they have one thing in common: a mission to fix their community's broken school and ensure a bright future for their children. The two women refuse to let any obstacles stand in their way as they battle a bureaucracy that's hopelessly mired in traditional thinking, and they seek to re-energize a faculty that has lost its passion for teaching.

Young Cedric Errol and his widowed mother live in genteel poverty in 1880s Brooklyn after the death of his father. Cedric's grandfather, the Earl of Dorincourt, has long ago disowned his son for marrying an American. But after the death of the Earl's remaining son, he decides to accept Cedric as his heir.

Prerna, a teenager growing up in rural India, comes of age when she’s introduced to the sport of skateboarding. As a result, she has to fight the odds to follow her dreams and compete in the national championship.

An odyssey through time and memory, centered on a place in New Jersey where—from wilderness, and then, later, from a home—love, loss, struggle, hope and legacy play out between couples and families over generations.

Mahree Bok lives on a farm in South Africa. Her father is a policeman who cannot hide his joy when activist Steve Biko is caught by the South African authorities. Piper Dellums is the daughter of a US congressman from California and who lives in a nice home in Washington DC. When Mahree is chosen to spend a semester at the Dellums' house, she doesn't expect that her host family would be black. Nor do her hosts suspect that she is not a black South African.

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

Russ Millings has just been released from prison after serving 21 years for a 3rd strike conviction for possessing an ounce of marijuana. As he tries to adapt to a world he doesn’t recognize – including trying to learn how to use the internet – he finds an abandoned baby in a dumpster behind the fast food restaurant where he works as a dishwasher. Unsure of what to do, and caught between impulses of kindness and panic, Russ soon realizes this could be his chance at redemption.

A grieving widower is drawn into a custody battle over his granddaughter, whom he helped raise her entire life.

Two separate stories mesh - in the first, a young music teacher, Maggie Andrews, begins dying of a heart condition and her son Nathan tries to get a pair of Christmas shoes for her before she dies. In the second, lawyer Robert Layton and his wife Kate are slowly drifting apart and the matter comes to a head during Christmas when Kate takes over for Maggie for the school choir.

A young girl tries to help her grandfather, who is suffering from Alzheimer’s, navigate his increasing forgetfulness, and ends up going on a remarkable adventure with him.

Joy lives a life filled with bad choices. At a young age, she marries and has a child–with an abusive thief who quickly ends up incarcerated. Left alone, she takes up with the guy's mate, another thief, who seems to give her some happiness but who also ends up locked up. She then takes up with a series of seedy types who offer nothing but momentary pleasure–if that.