Ben Kline is an American television star and a bankable name, who is cast to portray the Hungarian writer Miklos Radnoti, whose journal of poems was found with his body, buried in one of Hungary’s mass graves. Kline is also the son of a Holocaust survivor and has long resented his father’s refusal to speak about the War. Now given the opportunity to play the role of a hero, but faced with the reality of a victim, the boundaries between truth and illusion begin to blur.

After having witnessed her father's brutal murder, three-year-old Alma and her mother fled their war-torn homeland and settled in Iceland. Now, 25 years later, Alma is serving time in a psych ward for murdering her boyfriend, a crime she can't remember. But when she discovers the boyfriend is still alive, Alma decides to escape and kill him after all.

About that time, altogether for no definite reason, I took it into my head to cripple my life, but only in as disgusting a way as possible.

During a manned mission to Mars, Astronaut Mark Watney is presumed dead after a fierce storm and left behind by his crew. But Watney has survived and finds himself stranded and alone on the hostile planet. With only meager supplies, he must draw upon his ingenuity, wit and spirit to subsist and find a way to signal to Earth that he is alive.

Former student Raskolnikov is pushed to murder when struggling to pay the rent on his apartment. When the murder is being investigated by the police, Raskolnikov struggles between trying to hide his guilt and the pressure to confess.

In WWII Western Germany, Private David Manning reluctantly leaves behind a mortally wounded fellow soldier and searches for survivors from his platoon, only to learn from commanding officer Captain Pritchett that they have all been killed in action. Despite requesting a discharge on the grounds of mental disability, Manning is promoted to sergeant and assigned to lead a new platoon of young inductees.

A look at the monotonous daily struggle of a father and daughter in a windswept, desolate landscape. Over six days, their routine of eating boiled potatoes and tending a failing horse crumbles, symbolizing a slow descent into darkness, emptiness, and the end of existence.

In the horror of 1944 Auschwitz, a prisoner forced to burn the corpses of his own people finds moral survival trying to save from the flames the body of a boy he takes for his son, seeking to give him a proper Jewish burial.

Francis is an African soccer player whose life comes spiraling down after he fixes a match. Soon, he's on the run, taking shelter at a mountain ranch led by a deadly crime boss. Soon, Francis inspires revolt among the boss's workers, putting his life on the line for freedom.

In 1913, an orphaned young woman arrives in Budapest to take up employment as a milliner at the hat store that belonged to her late parents but becomes mired in a search for a brother she had never known of.