A young girl works to impress her highly critical parents and submits to a terrible fate as she struggles to meet their impossible standards.

A 5-year-old boy with a unique way of seeing the world feels alienated from his mother and tells her that he does not need her anymore. This viewpoint later causes him to lash out at his family, leading him to reflect on himself and his life.

On the eve of her students' elementary school graduation, a teacher in rural Ireland makes one last push to prepare her students for the real world.

A woman examines a period of time in her childhood spent with her sister and the babysitter's son, viewing it through the lens of an adult, and ponders how the experience might have shaped her as a person.

On the brink of death, an elderly man recounts his life to his great grandson, revealing that his mother's schizophrenic delusions of an otherworldly fantasy land were no delusions at all.

An afternoon at the park takes an unexpected turn for a mother and her son as the well-established families that they admire turn out to be unhappy people who secretly enjoy the misery of others. As the day progresses, the mother is surprised to learn that she and her son share many negative qualities with those families.

A six-year-old boy visiting his extended family for Christmas on the East coast must survive the constant abuse from his toxically masculine father which sends him further and further into the recesses of his imagination.

A rambunctious teenager with an inquisitive mind causes much grief for all his New England family and neighbors when he visits them in the summer of 1914, on the eve of World War I.

A mother, upon helping a girl at a playground one day, contemplates the nature of her marriage and the daughter who came from it.

A little girl navigates her relationships with two boys in her elementary school class, a brash bully and a shy victim, and learns about the nature of suffering.