Alejandro G. Inarritu · 2006 · global

Alejandro Inarritu's 2006 film, four stories on three continents connected by one rifle. A Japanese hunter gives it away in Morocco; two boys test it on a tourist bus; an American woman is hit; and in California a Mexican nanny takes her employers' children across the border to a wedding because nobody is coming home. Nothing that happens is anyone's plan.

1. 1
   Tokyo

   In Tokyo a deaf teenager moves through a city she cannot hear, furious and grieving, while police seek her father about a rifle he gave away on a hunting trip - the object connecting everything else in the film.

2. 2
   The Atlas

   In the Moroccan mountains two goatherd boys test their father's new rifle on a distant road and hit a tourist coach - a shot fired for no reason at all that turns into an international incident before the day is out.

3. 3
   Casablanca

   The wounded American woman is carried to a village and then, after hours of diplomatic argument over a helicopter, evacuated toward Casablanca - her husband learning what it is to be entirely dependent on people he cannot speak to.

4. 4
   San Diego

   In California their children's Mexican nanny cannot reach the parents and cannot miss her son's wedding, so she takes the two of them south across the border with her - a decision that seems reasonable for about eighteen hours.

5. 5
   Tijuana

   After the wedding the drive back goes wrong at the border, and the nanny ends up walking in the desert with two American children - and loses, in a single night, the sixteen years of her life that were spent looking after them.