As children in the loving Ekdahl family, Fanny and Alexander enjoy a happy life with their parents, who run a theater company. After their father dies unexpectedly, however, the siblings end up in a joyless home when their mother, Emilie, marries a stern bishop. The bleak situation gradually grows worse as the bishop becomes more controlling, but dedicated relatives make a valiant attempt to aid Emilie, Fanny and Alexander.

In 1967, experimental filmmaker Jorgen Leth created a striking short film, The Perfect Human, starring a man and women sitting in a box while a narrator poses questions about their relationship and humanity. Years later, Danish director Lars von Trier made a deal with Leth to remake his film five times, each under a different set of circumstances and with von Trier's strictly prescribed rules. As Leth completes each challenge, von Trier creates increasingly further elaborate stipulations.

Through the eyes of ten-year-old Alexander, we witness the delights and conflicts of the Ekdahl family, a sprawling bourgeois clan in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Sweden.

Ida, a Danish hairdresser who has lost her hair to cancer, returns home from the hospital one day to find her husband is cheating on her. She decides to travel to Italy on her own for her daughter's wedding, but discovers on arriving that the wedding gathering will present its own challenges.

The Shamer's daughter, Dina, has unwillingly inherited her mother's supernatural ability. She can look straight into the soul of other people. When the sole heir to the throne is wrongfully accused of the horrible murders of his family, it is up to Dina to uncover the truth, but soon she finds herself whirled into a dangerous power struggle with her own life at risk.

This television production captures Ingmar Bergman’s stage adaptation of Yukio Mishima’s Madame de Sade, set in France from 1772 to the aftermath of the French Revolution. While the Marquis de Sade remains imprisoned, six women—including his wife Renée—debate his actions, reputation, and meaning, revealing conflicting views on devotion, morality, and power.

Poet-filmmaker Jørgen Leth taps his own earliest inspirational veins by free-floating through a camera/microscope-enhanced set of poems with love as their first and final subject. For example, how a tropical island woman prepares for a meeting with her lover. The film was shot partly in the South Pacific with more than a nod to social anthropoliogist B. Malinowski's historical work The Sexual Life of Savages.

Scripted by Ingmar Bergman, this very personal film is about a destructive affair which wrecks the marriage of an actress (Marianne) and musician (Markus). Wanting to continue the affair, Marianne moves in with her lover. But she is tormented by Markus' decision not to let her have custody of their daughter. Finally Markus announces he may have a solution to the stalemate, but this leads to deception, lies and ultimately, tragedy.