Weddings and Marriage
These films keep circling back to a single test: what people will risk, endure, or quietly compromise to hold a union together, whether that union is a marriage, a family, or a promise made under pressure. The tone swings from tender (Sarah, Plain and Tall; A United Kingdom) to farcical (How to Make a Killing; The Details) to outright oppressive (Raise the Red Lantern), but each story treats commitment as something actively tested rather than simply declared. Even the outliers—a drifting trucker, a missing son, a runaway locomotive romance—orbit the same question of what people owe the ones they've bound themselves to.
