Lichter is an episodic tale from Hans-Christian Schmid about the life on the border between Germany and Poland. The film sheds light on the everyday stories of escape and desperateness.
Ben Sanderson, an alcoholic Hollywood screenwriter who lost everything because of his drinking, arrives in Las Vegas to drink himself to death. There, he meets and forms an uneasy friendship and non-interference pact with prostitute Sera.
A high-priced call girl is forced to depend on a reluctant private eye when she is stalked by a psychopath.
An emotionally scarred highway drifter shoots a sadistic trick who rapes her, and ultimately becomes America's first female serial killer.
Marnie is a thief, a liar, and a cheat. When her new boss, Mark Rutland, catches on to her routine kleptomania, she finds herself being blackmailed.
Zed is an American vault-cracker who travels to Paris to meet up with his old friend Eric. Eric and his gang have planned to raid the only bank in the city which is open on Bastille day. After offering his services, Zed soon finds himself trapped in a situation beyond his control when heroin abuse, poor planning and a call-girl named Zoe all conspire to turn the robbery into a very bloody siege.
When their ocean liner capsizes, a group of passengers struggle to survive and escape.
A pragmatic U.S. Marine observes the dehumanizing effects the U.S.-Vietnam War has on his fellow recruits from their brutal boot camp training to the bloody street fighting in Hue.
A down-and-out Brooklyn detective is hired to track down a singer on an odyssey that will take him through the desperate streets of Harlem, the smoke-filled jazz clubs of New Orleans, and the swamps of Louisiana and its seedy underworld of voodoo.
People in the future live in a totalitarian society. A technician named THX 1138 lives a mundane life between work and taking a controlled consumption of drugs that the government uses to make puppets out of people. As THX is without drugs for the first time he has feelings for a woman and they start a secret relationship.
Malee is a farm girl from Northern Thailand who decides to sneak away to Bangkok with her boyfriend, Chate, but shortly after arriving, Chate disappears and Malee finds herself held captive in a "love hotel". To pay for the room, she is forced to sleep with men. Af first, she is horrified by what she must do, but after a time, she becomes resigned and accepts her situation as fate.