Some people say that school days are the best day of our lives... but there are plenty of exceptions. When chronically bored student Alex seems to have no future, two of his teachers take the challenge to help him discover the motivation he lacks. The teachers, a couple in the middle of their divorce, will fight to impose the best way to make Alex a promising student.

12-year-old Renato experiences three significant events on the same day: the beginning of the Second World War, getting a bike, and witnessing the arrival of the gorgeous Malèna. Through his eyes, we see the curse of beauty and loneliness of Malena, whose husband is presumed dead, and, through his soul, we see his love for her.

Orlanda, Liuccia, Milù, Blu Blu and Veronica are five women in Palermo, Sicily, each different from the other. But, along with transvestite Kim and young man Maurizio, they all share something: they're "buttane", hookers, who spend the day between the streets and home; some got children, some got problems with the pimps, some with the clients...

Peppino Impastato is a quick-witted lad growing up in 1970s Sicily. Despite hailing from a family with Mafia ties and living just one hundred steps from the house of local boss Tano Badalamenti, Peppino decides to expose the Mafia by using a pirate radio station to broadcast his political pronouncements in the form of ironic humour.

Rome. The 1980s. After the magnum opus The Art of Joy she has been working on for a decade is rejected by the Italian publishing world, writer Goliarda Sapienza commits a desperate theft that costs her her reputation and social position. Incarcerated in Italy’s largest female prison, she finds herself living alongside thieves, junkies, sex workers and revolutionaries. After her release, she continues to meet with these women and over the course of a sweltering summer, a life-changing relationship flowers – a relationship that will reawaken her the desire to live and to write.