Curmudgeonly author Giles De'Ath, a widower with a marked distaste for modern popular culture, attempts to buy a ticket for a film adaptation of an E.M. Forster novel, but instead finds himself watching a tacky teen sex comedy. Yet when the beautiful Ronnie Bostock appears on the movie screen, Giles finds himself caught in a whirlwind of unanswered questions about both his own sexuality and his place in late 20th-century society.

The film begins following the British victory of the first Opium War and the seizure of Hong Kong. Although the island is largely uninhabited and the terrain unfriendly, it has a large port that both the British government and various trading companies believe will be useful for the import of merchandise to be traded on mainland China, a highly lucrative market.

A handsome jewel thief is arrested and in order to avoid prison, must break into the heavily guarded German Embassy to steal millions in gems.

Who has bought the house which is the home for a dozen flat dwellers? When the heating fails and a flat is violently repossessed, things begin to look hopeless. But the tenants begin to fight back...

A friendly street kid in India, during the last years of the nineteenth century, looks and considers himself Indian, but is in fact a Brit. The Brits discover his true origin, and train him as a spy.

Janice Beard is a dreamer who can't seem to quite make it big. She is working in an auto design company and falls for the mailboy, but he is hiding secrets.

A white boy lives in a racially divided town. The only thing he cares about is playing his drums. A popular black band from school needs a drummer and he joins them, but being colour blind in this town makes life very difficult.

When a local black politician is murdered an undercover police officer unveils a web of police corruption which puts lives at risk and threatens the whole community.

A clever paraplegic man, haunted by visions of imaginary gangsters, becomes desperate to leave the "cripple" facility he's stuck in. To get out, he must outwit the facility's matron and the constant surveillance of one of his fellows.