Andrew Boulton

Em 1938, quando Shanghai é ocupada pelos japoneses, o traficante Walter Faraday é morto pela polícia ao tentar deixar a cidade com 500 kg de ópio. Um ano depois, a missionária americana Gloria Tatlock chega a Shanghai à procura deste ópio, com o objetivo de usá-lo para aliviar a dor de soldados feridos na guerra. Oferecendo uma passagem de volta aos Estados Unidos como pagamento, ela consegue a ajuda de Glendon Wasey, um rude e esperto comerciante, e juntos enfrentam os perigos da caçada - já que outros grupos também estão de olho no ópio desaparecido.

A couple of old friends drown their sorrows together while reveling in the naivety of a young newly-wed.

A window cleaner fancies a sausage roll, but all is not well in the sausage roll factory.

A boy goes to see his probation officer.

A man relentlessly bombards another man with small talk, while the other man tries to fend for himself while using crutches.

A slow-witted couple decide to start a family.

Thatcherism and the Irish troubles provide the backdrop for this study of Mick, a well-meaning youth in Sheffield, who has, unlike Dickens' Pip, no expectations. Mick lives with his parents, works on his motorbike, looks for work, and every two weeks gets his check from the dole. There are no jobs. His best mate Alan joins the army to fix tanks and is sent to Belfast to quell Catholics. At a disco, Mick meets Karen, who works at a shoe shop and lives with her recently-separated mom. Karen misses her dad. She offers Mick emotional stability and a route to adulthood; Alan pitches the army. Does Mick have a future?

Shortly after Margaret Thatcher's election as prime minister, Ken Loach returned to documentary, convinced that the long gestation of feature films made them useless as instruments of topical social comment. But his trade union documentary A Question of Leadership, intended for national ITV broadcast, was criticised by the Independent Broadcasting Authority for its explicitly anti-government stance. It was eventually screened a year later, exclusively in the Midlands (tx. 13/8/1981). Believing that the then-new Channel 4 would be more amenable to politicised documentaries, Loach proposed the four-part Questions of Leadership (1983), a wider-ranging study of the trade union movement - but on viewing the completed programmes' strong criticism of leading trade unionists, an anxious Channel 4 shortened the series to two parts and proposed screening a 'balancing' documentary by a different filmmaker, before scrapping the broadcast altogether.

Mr Mockler and Mrs Acland have never met, but gradually Mrs Acland 's ghosts begin to take over Mr Mockler 's life.