A starving man wandering the countryside finds solace in a young woman's cottage where she offers him food and rest. But when the young woman starts to behave as if the man is a threat, he must decide whether or not to live up to her fears.

In a small rural farm town, a middle-aged poet struggles with aging and finding meaning in his life.

A lonely man in his forties imagines a domestic life with a woman he briefly met who is interested in his furniture, but not his marriage proposal.

A middle-aged man and his wife struggle to fight the cold, care for their kids, and maintain their marriage as they build a house on a ranch in Washington state during several years filled with set backs and heartache.

Reeling from the death of her first husband, a woman living alone on a Montana homestead finds peace as she slowly falls in love with the logger living next door.

A hungry vagabond in rural Georgia during the 1930s finds himself going to desperate lengths to find a safe place to rest and a meal to eat after unlucky encounters with the law and locals in the towns he travels to.

An American deserter from World War II stumbles upon a mysterious, isolated village in the French mountains.

A boy learns from his father’s best friend the history of his family and the value of man’s relationship with nature, but is interrupted by his father’s death and his mother’s sudden arrival.

On the Great Plains, an aging farmer and his wife struggle to sell their produce amid an increase in frozen food manufacturing. The farmer must figure out how to avoid the fate of his neighbors, who were pushed out of business and into welfare dependence.

When a northern writer arrives in a rural Tennessee town to better understand the culture for his novel, he is put through a harrowing night by the menfolk who, in the course of an elaborate joke, convince him he has inadvertently killed the son of his hosts.